Reserving it to Series 10 and 9 really exposes their lack of hardware innovation. I mean, we were talking about them measuring glucose levels for years and this is what we get as a new flagship feature?
I’m confident there’s more to it than just sensor availability. Compute power for starters, as well as the fact that a Series 1 accelerometer may not have the necessary resolution, etc.
Reserving it to Series 10 and 9 really exposes their lack of hardware innovation.
Ah, the ol’ “Apple didn’t build what I want, ergo, Apple doesn’t innovate” trope.
Without knowing more details about the implementation, it may rely on combining data from other sensors as well, it may need a certain frequency/resolution from a sensor that's not available in earlier generations of hardware, it might place too much demand on compute or power to maintain prior products' expected behavior, etc
Love it or hate it, this mentality of "the feature is technically possible but we won't enable it because we're not happy with the compromises it demands" is, by design, exactly the sort of logic that Apple is known for.
Although it's possible that Sleep Apnea detection uses the oxygen saturation sensor but doesn't show its results directly.
I hope it’s just still disabled. It would suck for someone to buy a new watch, the fix the dispute in 2 months, and you never get the feature until you buy another new watch.
They’re clearly not bending. I don’t know if they’ve given up or waiting on an appeal or maybe home a new administration will tell the ITC to go away or what.
However, reading on PAT (Peripheral arterial tone) and existing FDA-approved devices using that, they indeed use oxygen but not temperature. See for example "WatchPAT ONE" device.
I think that growth is going to slow no matter what they do. Western and Japanese markets are saturated, and Chinese markets (once most promising) are bringing fierce competition both from local competition and the government.
They appear to have restricted it to 8 GB of RAM devices or more (when those appear).
During The Talk Show interview at WWDC with John Gruber an Apple exec (Joz?) said they did it because of user experience issues, seeming implying speed.
And given how hard AI hits hardware I think that’s relatively believable.
There are also other issues like power consumption overnight. Older watches have smaller batteries and slow charging. People will update the software, use the new features, and complain that Apple software updates are killing the battery (waking up to low battery plus slow charing means not being able to charge up before leaving for work). This has the effect of Apple only backporting new features if they don't consume too much battery.