A federal judge in California has refused to overturn a $634 million jury verdict against Apple in its patent dispute with medical technology company Masimo.
This decision closes off Apple’s last opportunity to escape the damages award at the trial court level.
U.S. District Judge James V. Selna rejected Apple’s motion for judgment as a matter of law and denied a request for a new trial.
The ruling means the $634 million award, handed down by a jury in November 2025, now stands unless Apple succeeds on appeal, which the company has already said it intends to pursue.
What the jury actually decided
The jury found that heart-rate monitoring and notification features in Apple Watch infringed a Masimo patent covering pulse oximetry technology.
Apple’s central argument in its post-trial motions was that its product did not qualify as a “patient monitor” under the patent’s language, a classification that would have placed it outside the scope of Masimo’s claims.
Judge Selna disagreed, siding with the jury’s conclusion that the Apple Watch fits within a broader, everyday interpretation of patient monitoring rather than the narrower medical-equipment definition Apple preferred.
Apple also challenged the jury instructions and objected to the exclusion of testimony from one of its expert witnesses. The judge found neither issue serious enough to justify starting the trial over.
Years of litigation behind this ruling
Masimo first sued Apple in January 2020, alleging that Apple had taken trade secrets and infringed patents tied to optical health-monitoring technology built into Apple Watch. The dispute split into separate proceedings over the following years.
A 2023 ruling by the International Trade Commission led to a US import ban on Apple Watch models with blood oxygen monitoring, briefly forcing Apple to pull certain models from store shelves before resuming sales with that feature disabled.
Apple later introduced a revised blood oxygen measurement approach that processes sensor data on a paired iPhone and displays results through the Health app.
Masimo responded by suing US Customs and Border Protection over the agency’s decision to allow imports of watches using that redesigned method.
The $634 million verdict arose from the original California patent case, which ran on a separate track from the ITC proceedings. That jury verdict now survives Apple’s challenge at the district court level.
Apple’s position going forward
In a statement provided to Law360, Apple pushed back on the broader litigation: “Masimo is a medical device company that does not sell any products to consumers. Over the past six years they have sued Apple in multiple courts and asserted over 25 patents, the majority of which have been found to be invalid. The single patent in this case expired in 2022, and is specific to historic patient monitoring technology from decades ago. We plan to appeal.”
An appeal to the Federal Circuit could take years to resolve, meaning the $634 million figure may remain in legal limbo well into the latter part of the decade.
Apple has not indicated whether it will pay the damages while the appeal proceeds or seek a stay of the judgment.
