Yes, very good for the employees. Apple even offered them 2x their salaries to leave Masimo.
>How HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of [sic] competition is beyond me.
That suggests HN is a monoculture of some sort of united front. It is not. Diversity of opinion is best for this community (and all communities).
And, sorry, what competition was killed off here? I, as the consumer, was never considering Massimo for my blood oxygen measurement needs. I bought an Apple Watch and just want it to be as feature-full as possible. So does Apple.
I wasn’t going to buy a device just for blood monitoring. What they produced is valuable to me as a feature of a product but not as a product in of itself
It’s sort of like having your watch tell you whether you slept well or not. Didn’t you already know? If you think you slept well and your watch disagrees, are you going to trust its opinion over your own?
Also, I don't think most people are in a position where they feel like they have amazing sleep every night. Yeah, maybe those people have nothing to gain from gadgets kind of like a person at ideal weight doesn't gain anything from counting calories: but what about the rest of us?
My wrist device was critical in helping me realize how few hours I was sleeping despite being in bed with my eyes closed for 8 hours.
These apps can detect that you are moving around a lot and also detect that you are snoring (another sign of sleep apnea).
Even if you know that you snore without using a sleeping app, that doesn't really give you a picture of how bad it could be. I apparently stop breathing and sometimes start choking in my sleep.
Now that I have a diagnosis of sleep apnea sleep apps are still really helpful. If I'm still snoring, it means I probably need to adjust the pressure on my CPAP machine. If the app for my CPAP machine tells me that I'm having a lot of episodes over the course of the night, I might need to adjust the pressure or the fit of the mask.
sleep apps have probably literally saved lives.
1. The heart rate line graph during my sleep made me realize just how bad exercise within 6 hours of bed is. My resting heart rate is 43bpm, yet if I exercise, I'll try to sleep at 60bpm that slowly decreases to 45bpm over 4-6 hours. And it always coincides with worse sleep.
2. I realized how often my HR jumps during sleep. Turns out I have a deviated septum that got bad enough in my 30s to regularly block breathing. I thought I had sleep apnea that would require a CPAP but it turns out I just need nasal strips. No more problems.
3. If you see you have bad sleep, you can now ask the question "how do I improve my sleep?" If you don't know you have bad sleep because you think you're sleeping 8 hours, then you don't realize you have levers to pull.
And I know this isn't your argument, but that's a VERY narrow market for the purposes of a US inquiry into monopolies. Like, the normal market definition fights are about whether you should be considering "premium smartphones" or "smartphones" as a whole. Or all of the grocery stores in a given region, and whether that should include convenience stores that also sell groceries.
I'd be hard pressed to imagine a court really contemplating an argument that a company has a monopoly in a very small slice of a market. It would be like saying that Rolex has a monopoly in luxury sport watches with headquarters in Geneva.
Of course in Apple's case this Masimo story is not the only monopolistic practice.
The correct analogy would be a watch market dominated by Casio and Swatch with no independent smaller brands.
Because every smaller brand that becomes somewhat successful is bought out by the Big Two. Or never gets that far because new IP somehow ends up being the sole property of the Big Two through various other means.
(Technically an oligopoly, but still maintained by monopolistic lock-ins and actions.)
I disagree with this framing where offering more money to employees is described with the same words used to describe stealing property
> smaller company
I mean, ok yea that’s technically true, but Masimo makes billions a year in revenue. They are not a smol bean company
How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.
Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.
> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets
There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.
There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.
Massimo is 400x smaller than Apple. WTF are you talking about like they're in the same weight class?
It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.
I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.
Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.
(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)
Their (limited) levels.fyi data does not indicate this is one of their goals.
Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.
And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]
If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html
Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.
Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.
> This matter was settled during the fourth quarter of 1999 for an amount not material to the Company's financial position or results of operations.
If Apple did pay $500 million, I think that would have been material to the company's financial position, as their profit that year was $601M.
Again, are there any examples that are less debatable and/or more recent? I don't have a dog in this fight. But if Apple is infamous for this behavior, it seems like there would be stronger examples.
1. See page 59: https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...
The original team ended up founding Intrinsity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity) and being involed with the Samsung A8 and Apple A4 designs. Apple ended up buying the company and many of those people are the ones designing their current chips. (https://touchreviews.net/apple-intrinsity-implications/)
I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.
So doing monopolistic and illegal things is OK because it makes some people rich?
They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.
Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?
Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.
> from employers than any other business in history
I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.