Apple didn’t hold back with the launch of the new Apple Watch Series 10, boasting a lot of new features such as a sleeker design, a larger display, its new S10 processor, and new tracking functionality such as sleep apnea detection. With that said, one thing that Apple didn’t mention was the lack of its blood oxygen feature, which was available on older Apple Watch models.
In fact, the feature was available as far back as the Watch 6 series – so why did Apple not include this on the Series 10?
For this we only need to look several months back. If you can recall, Apple was under hot water following a legal patent dispute from medical hardware manufacturer Masimo. The latter accused Apple of allegedly infringing upon patents revolving around blood oxygen monitoring hardware, which resulted in a temporary sales ban for the company’s Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches.
As a result, blood oxygen monitoring will not be accessible for users in the United States, although folks who purchase the Series 10 in other countries will be able to use the feature. There’s also been speculation if the US variant of the watch will disable the feature via software, or if it’s missing the actual hardware needed to enable blood oxygen monitoring.
Source: Tech Crunch
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