What's happening with the Apple share price?

The Apple share price has had a rough time this year. In early August 2023, share prices in the world’s biggest company dropped an historic 4.8 percent in just a few short hours after a disappointing earnings season announcement, temporarily robbing the company of its hallowed trillion-dollar market cap.

Now, Apple Inc has another PR nightmare to deal with, with the search term ‘Apple watch news’ up 450 percent worldwide in the past hour (at the time of the writing of this article).

Apple watch news

In October, medtech company Masimo filed a complaint against Apple Inc with the United States' International Trade Commission (ITC), arguing that certain Apple watches’ features (which measure oxygen saturation in the blood) infringe on existing Masimo patents.

Perhaps surprisingly, the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled in Masimo’s favour and the Silicon Valley giant has been ordered to restrict US sales of those smartwatches from Christmas Day next week.

Apple Inc, not to be outdone, said in a statement that it would halt sales of these watches this week on December 21^st.

It means that, during the vital holiday season, many of watches in Apple’s billions-of-dollars smartwatch business – all of which are made in India – cannot enter the United States or be sold within there after the 20^th.

However, as legal experts for Caldwell Tanner Murphy and Jameson Pasek note on JD Supra:

This has certainly not been lost on Apple Inc, which has reportedly turned into a parodied version of Santa’s workshop in the frantic lead-up to the 25^th.

On December 19^th, Bloomberg reported that “engineers are racing to make changes to algorithms on the device that measure a user’s blood oxygen level – a feature that Masimo Corp. has argued infringes its patients. They’re adjusting how the technology determines oxygen saturation and presents the data to customers”.

However, no news of this having been resolved has been posted yet, with just one day to go to Apple’s self-imposed deadline.