BUSINESS
- Apple has pulled the newest Apple Watches off its store shelves in the US.
- That’s due to a patent dispute with health-tech company Masimo over a blood oxygen tracker.
- Scroll to learn more about Joe Kiani, the CEO and founder of Masimo.
It just got a lot harder to snag a new Apple Watch this holiday season, thanks to the tech behemoth’s patent dispute with a lesser-known company, Masimo, over a blood oxygen tracker.
The iPhone maker has officially removed the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 from its physical and online stores in the US. The move comes after the International Trade Commission ruled in October that these latest watch versions include a blood oxygen tracker that violates patents held by Masimo, a health technology company.
“This is not an accidental infringement,” Joe Kiani, the CEO and founder of Masimo, told Bloomberg. “This is a deliberate taking of our intellectual property.” Kiani didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment before publication of this story.
The news has spurred many to ask how it’ll affect Apple, which has appealed the ruling, saying the watch ban will cause “irreparable harm” to its business. One analyst estimated the ban could cost the company between $300 to $400 million in sales. But there’s another question that’s surfacing: Who is Kiani, the Masimo leader going head-to-head with Apple? Scroll to find out more.
Joe Kiani was born in Iran and moved to the US when he was nine years old.
He moved to Alabama with his family in 1974 so his father could study engineering, Forbes reported, before relocating to San Diego, where his father pursued his MBA.
Two years after that move, Kiani’s parents headed back to Iran for work, leaving him and his sister (aged 14 and 15) in the US. Kiani’s mother was a nurse who visited villages and remote locations where residents didn’t have access to healthcare, he said an interview with the Texas Medical Center.
By the late 1980s, Kiani had gained a bachelor’s and master’s in electrical engineering from San Diego State university.
Kiani tried to go the pre-med route as a chemistry major, but stopped because he wasn’t good at chemistry, he told the Texas Medical Center. Instead, he said was good at physics and decided to become an engineer.
After he graduated, he worked at a medical technology startup to work on a pulse oximeter: a device that monitors blood oxygen.
He said he left the company at 23 because it wanted him to work on a making the pulse oximeter cheaper instead of making the existing technology more accurate, the CEO told the Texas Medical Center.
Later, Kiani started Masimo Corporation in 1989 in a garage in California with a $40,000 loan he took on his condo.
When Kiani started the company with the goal of improving pulse oxomiters, the CEO worked 7 days a week and only took two-four day weekends for seven years, he said during a 2013 commencement speech at Chapman University.
He led the development of Masimo’s Signal Extraction Technology, a pulse oximeter that the company claims can accurately measure blood oxygen levels, especially when the patient is in motion.
