The Morning After: Apple pauses Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales
It's halting sales due to patent issues.
Some holiday misery for Apple: It will soon pause sales of its latest Apple Watches in the US due to an International Trade Commission (ITC) ban. The company will suspend sales online this week and at Apple retail locations after December 24. Ho ho ho.
It’s all down to a patent dispute over the wearables’ blood oxygen sensor. Cast your minds back: Medical tech company Masimo sued Apple in 2021 for alleged violations of light-based blood-oxygen monitoring patents. In October, the ITC upheld a judge’s ruling from earlier this year that the Apple Watch did violate Masimo’s patents. The ITC’s order blocks all Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 imports to the US after December 25.
The case went to the White House for a 60-day Presidential Review Period. Although President Biden has one more week to decide whether to veto the ITC ruling, Apple has pre-emptively complied with the commission’s decision.
President Biden reportedly owns an Apple Watch – but also a load of other watches too.
— Mat Smith
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We test and review tons of gadgets every year, and (for some reason) we also buy a lot of things for ourselves. This year, those purchases included coffee-making upgrades, fancy keyboards and even pricey digital pianos. But there are plenty of other things we’ve bought and loved this year that have yet to make it on the site. Here, our staff looks back at the things that were worth the money.
A new picture of Uranus looks like a sci-fi portal
The Webb telescope’s NIRCam filters are to thank for this.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has a treat to celebrate the upcoming second anniversary of its launch: an image of the icy planet Uranus. The picture, resembling a glowing blue marble rippling in a black ocean, was funneled through the telescope’s infrared filters to capture wavelengths we wouldn’t see with the naked eye.
Yeah, it looks like the CBS logo.
US lawmakers call for DOJ probe into Apple’s blocking of Beeper’s iMessage app
They asked an assistant attorney general to determine whether Apple violated antitrust laws.
More socks for Apple’s legal department this Christmas. A bipartisan group of US senators and representatives have urged the Department of Justice to investigate whether Apple violated antitrust laws by attempting to block Beeper Mini’s access to iMessage. Senators have asked an assistant attorney general to look into Apple’s “potentially anticompetitive conduct.”
Hopefully, senators will have learned lessons from the other times they’ve tried to grill technology companies without the technical expertise for their questions to make sense.