The Masimo Freedom has all the tech Apple can't use
Masimo, the company that sued Apple over patent infringement, has unveiled its own blood oxygen monitoring smartwatch called the Masimo Freedom.
The Masimo Freedom is a health-focused device that can track blood oxygen levels, hydration index, respiration rate, pulse rate variability, pulse rate, steps, and detect falls.
The smartwatch is currently in prototype stage and will be available for sale later this year at a price of $999.
Not a fan of Apple but the number of people who would benefit from being able to monitor blood oxygenation is more meaningful to me than Masimo's ability to sell thousand dollar smartwatches with its patent technology. Would be great if somehow this patent was bought out and made public domain so people outside the upper middle class could have an affordable way to track their vitals.
Apple is run by some absolute morons who were happy to try and steal the tech
Xerox PARC intensifies
If you look at almost everything "iconic" that Apple has ever done they have "borrowed" or outright stolen from others. This is entirely on brand for Apple. They just ran up against someone who was willing to push back.
Would be great if somehow this patent was bought out and made public domain so people outside the upper middle class could have an affordable way to track their vitals.
Apple is a strange choice as a champion for that. Their devices always have been notoriously overpriced.
Apple also holds over 95,500 patents. I will never get why some people defend this crazy company. They make underperforming computers and sell them for wayyy over their value.
Their devices always have been notoriously overpriced.
I disagree. They don’t offer a low-end option, but their devices are fairly priced for what you get. People keep claiming they are overpriced but when you ask them for a cheaper alternative they always respond with something not even remotely comparable.
You're correct that they don't offer low end but their products are still over priced for what you get. Not saying that makes their products terrible - you do get a decent machine, you just have to pay more than its actually worth because it came from apole. It's part of their money making model - generates prestige which drives demand.
The stand costs like 15$ to produce (including machine time, material cost and shipping)
I bet you can find dozens of chinese clones for under 100$ that function equally as well or better.
Have you looked? I mean, that question is rhetorical... No, you haven't.
You should check out the competition. Samsung makes some great devices, razer makes some great devices. Even Google makes solid competition, though I prefer others over them.
Have you looked? I mean, that question is rhetorical... No, you haven't.
Of course. Name one manufacturer that makes anything comparable to a MacBook Pro with M1
You should check out the competition. Samsung makes some great devices, razer makes some great devices. Even Google makes solid competition, though I prefer others over them.
Unfortunately, I have intimate experience with all of those and more. I’m a mobile developer, we buy a lot of phones for testing purposes. We literally have an entire closet full of phones, every even remotely popular model, we’ve got it.
The stuff I’m working on is quite demanding, think computer vision related. We have to make it work on both iOS and Android and the latter is quite a pain in the ass. Device fragmentation is a bitch and performance is significantly below that of iOS devices, even on the high-end models (and we also have to support the low-end stuff). So on Android we have to choose less advanced algorithms, process at a lower internal resolution and frame rate, stuff like that.
I wish Android manufacturers got their shit together and catch up to Apple. It would make my life so much easier if they did, but for now there is a pretty big performance gap.
It's not at all a different product. It's a direct competitor who makes a superior product.
Again -- I've had a smart watch that does all the shit apple watch does, for half a decade before apple even thought about it. And mine can go a month without charging.
It's a direct competitor who makes a superior product.
Define superior. Only Apple makes Smartwatch SoCs with any kind of decent performance, other manufacturers like Qualcomm don’t put a lot of effort into the market segment and just put an old CPU core in a low power package and call it a day. It’s simply not profitable enough for them.
Garmin does not do way more. Most of their "apps" are just replacement watch faces. Garmin doesn't even try to compete on features, their selling points are battery life, price, and integration with other Garmin fitness accessories. Apple/Google/Samsung watches are so capable they're basically tiny phones.
He's full of shit, and the people upvoting him don't know anything about Garmin watches. Garmin doesn't compete with apple. They don't want to compete with apple. Garmin doesn't take the kitchen sink approach that apple/Google/Samsung do. They focus on fitness and battery life, they're competing with Fitbit. This liar is pulling the old "I like it, therefore it's the best at everything" trope. He's a child. Ignore him.
Or comparing similarly specced macs vs PCs (I bet that's why they moved away from x86 again, because it was too obvious how overpriced they were when the specs could be compared 1:1).
The thousand dollar monitor stand is not a consumer product and simply sold separately because not a lot of people are going to need it. The monitor it’s meant for is actually a lot cheaper than comparable monitors.
Or comparing similarly specced macs vs PCs
In the x86 era similarly specced PCs had similar prices or were even more expensive. The thing about Mac’s is that while you can get a PC that has some better specs for less, you couldn’t get anything that matched all the specs. It may have had a faster CPU, but would come in a crappy plastic case, weigh a ton and run out of battery in 30 seconds. Or it ran forever on a single charge but had a CPU that was slow as molasses.
(I bet that's why they moved away from x86 again, because it was too obvious how overpriced they were when the specs could be compared 1:1).
No, it’s because x86 is an overcomplicated mess with terrible performance/watt. x86 CPUs run hot, drain your battery and still don’t perform great. Apple’s M series SoC’s are amazing. A clean, modern ISA, high IPC, low power usage, low heat. It doesn’t matter if my MacBook Pro (M1 Max )runs on battery or wall power, it’s always blazing fast. It has insane battery life, does not get hot and is completely silent.
I was referring to the desktop space. Apple is a lot more competitive in the laptop space (unless you're a gamer), but their desktop specs always made me laugh at the price they ask for it. Granted, I haven't looked recently, but any time I've looked in the past, their price seems about 1k too high for what they are offering.
But yeah, x86 laptops are generally a shitshow. I had a decent personal one, though that was used more like a very portable desktop than a true laptop. That one just stopped charging one day (though its timing was impeccable because I was already in the process of moving my files to a new desktop I had just built, just had to pull the drives out to get the rest of it). And a cheap one I threw Linux on for school that did the job. But my first work laptop at my current job was garbage and the current one is relatively better, but also has a bunch of issues, enough that I don't think very highly of HP even ignoring their printer bs.
Gamers and custom builders. We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn't able to keep up with the company's needs.
The very top of personal computing is still desktops. And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there's a premium you pay for the smaller package. Custom laptops are becoming more common but the size still limits choices you can make.
We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn't able to keep up with the company's needs.
We just run all that stuff in the cloud, much easier to scale up and down.
And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there's a premium you pay for the smaller package.
Yeah, but does it matter? You can get a decked out MacBook Pro for less than €5k, that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. You can’t bring a desktop computer into a meeting, or to a customer, or home for a work from home day.
With Windows or Linux, I spend a lot of my time operating the computer. On macOS I just spend my time on the tasks I was working on. The nice thing about Apple’s software is that it gets out of the way so you can focus on what actually matters.
This can be absolutely true the other way around too, depending on how proficient you are, and what you are used to or find intuitive. For me, macOS is extremely unintuitive, for example, while my fully personalized Linux setup allows me to do what I want.
It is very subjective, ultimately.
I’m very proficient in Linux. I used to run it as a desktop about 15 years ago, before I was able to afford a Mac. Still run it on the server, both personally and professionally. It’s come a long way, but it’s not nearly as polished as macOS.
Polished doesn't mean functional or ergonomic, which is something I value a lot. The ability to customize what I want easily is also something that Linux offers much more directly than macOS (which is the definition of getting in the way).
Again, I totally believe that for someone the Mac experience can be superior, but it depends on preference, use, habits and priorities.
I want to customize all the keybindings for workspaces, since I want to create my own workflow. I think different people have different preferences. I am not looking for an out-of-the-box experience, but a setup I can make mine and opinionated. That's what I mean that it depends on personal requirements too.
It's also part of my career, and has been for the last 15+ years. I mentioned desktop use because that was way more challenging back then than it is today. I first started using Linux personally in '98 with S.u.S.E. 5.3, then moved to using it as my main OS about a year later. Damn, that's 25 years.... in my mind it feels less. I must be getting old. Used it in a professional capacity on the server since graduation.
I was the same, 20 years ago. I’m a professional developer, I already have a lot of complicated stuff I’m dealing with in the software I’m building. I don’t want to mess with anything unrelated as well.
4 years on macbooks as a software dev. Haven't seen a more annoying OS for power users than OSX. The Apple software is constantly in the way, breaking things or crashing because you plugged in a non apple certified keyboard.
Yup. Also some kernel panics due to non compatible DP adapters. They are picky machines. Those issues were with the 2019 i7 mac pro. My current M1 has issues with certain usb-c docks
I think it's sad. This corpo worship results in higher prices for all of us. Apple created this weird pseudo religion that makes other vendors (like Samsung) raising their prices more acceptable while competition should actually put prices under pressure.
They notoriously sell older components and technologies in their brand new computers.
I have one I got for free that was made in 2020. It's a MacBook Air. It has 8gb of RAM... I don't even know how they found RAM chips that small in 2020. It freezes every day when all I'm doing is running a web browser. This computer was $1,000 at the time it launched.
The base amount of RAM is a bit low, I agree. But why would you order one with less RAM than you need? I have an M1 Max with 64GB and it just flies. No matter what I throw at it, it stays fast and responsive.