[dandesim]

Apple does JIT assembly, so it would be relatively 'easy' to release a new/factory OS version that has this feature disabled. Take the marketing of this feature down, or mark it as in development, and should be okay?

I don't know why they haven't just done the simple solution yet and are instead fighting this in court, continuing to lose sales, for a feature .1% of people will use?

[gnicholas]

I believe they tried to do this early on and discovered that a software-only fix is not sufficient to defeat the import ban. That's because the import ban covers devices that have the particular hardware, which these devices would still have.

I do agree that it is odd to have such a big fight over a feature that so few people use. But Apple's behavior is consistent with this notion — they don't want to pay Massimo much because people don't really care about the feature. Therefore Apple isn't willing to pay much of a license fee for it.

Of course, it's likely that if Apple had this tech in the clear, they would have promoted it much more, and made it more prominent to the users. They probably hesitate to market the feature that prominently because they don't want to end up with a huge patent verdict against them, on the grounds that it's an important part of their newer watches. They'd rather it look like "just another one of many features" on the watch, which would command a modest royalty.