Biden Won't Save The Apple Watch

Apple has been in a running battle with medical device maker Masimo over its blood oxygen-sensing technology.

The White House has left Apple without hope of federal intervention to keep the current-gen Apple Watch on store shelves. The Biden administration has officially declined to veto restrictions on the company’s wearables due to an ongoing patent dispute, despite the Cupertino tech giant’s pleas. So much for the season of giving.

The U.S. International Trade Commission’s order banning Apple from selling its wearables went into full effect on Tuesday. CEO Tim Cook and his company were desperately hoping that the White House, and specifically Assistant Trade Representative Katherine Tai, would come to the rescue and halt the ITC’s decision. The rep’s office told Reuters on Tuesday it decided not to veto the ban “following careful consultations.”

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The ban isn’t impacting the budget-minded Apple Watch SE or previous-gen wearables, so if you don’t mind losing out on the double tap gesture control (which is the Series 9’s only major improvement over the Series 8 model other than on-device Siri support) you could opt for that. Better yet, it might be better to wait until 2024 when Apple might reveal its Apple Watch Series “X,” which will supposedly be a much more dramatic refresh to the watch brand.

The next Apple Watch edition could include a new microLED display and long-touted blood pressure monitoring features. However, it’s unclear how the ongoing Masimo patent dispute might impact Apple’s plans for more wearables. Rumormongers are also hinting the next watch could reinvent the mechanism for attaching the watch bands, something that was also touted by Bloomberg’s Apple Guru Mark Gurman back in August. This rumored magnetic band attachment system would make all the current watch bands obsolete, which might be another reason to skip this current generation entirely.

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