Patents expire in 25 years. Either they innovate as hell or you can just verbatim reproduce their model from 25 years ago and compete, you can't have it both ways.
Philips and Siemens, of all companies, decided to partner and license the technology, and Apple decided they can toss them around.
25 years is the length of an entire career, what the actual hell, patents should last for 3-7 years at the most, if they exist at all (they're mostly an outdated, garbage relic system that doesn't encourage innovation anymore and is simply used to keep smaller players out of markets)
But no, that’s actually the hard part. Something Apple did manage to accomplish quite well though (just like many other smaller companies would be able to do if there were no trivial patents preventing them from doing that).
> Masimo has been on the cutting edge of pulse-oximetry
Maybe because they built an artificial patent moat around themselves and no other company can compete?