Masimo — the company that got the Apple Watch banned — has unveiled its new smartwatch

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 424 points –
Masimo — the company that got the Apple Watch banned — has unveiled its new smartwatch
tomsguide.com
  • Masimo, the company that sued Apple over patent infringement, has unveiled its own blood oxygen monitoring smartwatch called the Masimo Freedom.
  • The Masimo Freedom is a health-focused device that can track blood oxygen levels, hydration index, respiration rate, pulse rate variability, pulse rate, steps, and detect falls.
  • The smartwatch is currently in prototype stage and will be available for sale later this year at a price of $999.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/aOUXX

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Their devices always have been notoriously overpriced.

I disagree. They don’t offer a low-end option, but their devices are fairly priced for what you get. People keep claiming they are overpriced but when you ask them for a cheaper alternative they always respond with something not even remotely comparable.

Which apple product doesn't have a chaper alternative?

All of them. Every cheaper alternative is just a crappier product that cheaper because it’s simply not as good.

I'll take my Garmin over you apple toys any day

Can a Garmin even run apps? It’s a completely different product.

There's been a Garmin app store for twice as long as Apple has been making watches.

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/

It's not at all a different product. It's a direct competitor who makes a superior product.

Again -- I've had a smart watch that does all the shit apple watch does, for half a decade before apple even thought about it. And mine can go a month without charging.

It's a direct competitor who makes a superior product.

Define superior. Only Apple makes Smartwatch SoCs with any kind of decent performance, other manufacturers like Qualcomm don’t put a lot of effort into the market segment and just put an old CPU core in a low power package and call it a day. It’s simply not profitable enough for them.

I don't give a shit about any of that. It's what the watch DOES, and Garmin does WAY more, for WAY longer.

Garmin does not do way more. Most of their "apps" are just replacement watch faces. Garmin doesn't even try to compete on features, their selling points are battery life, price, and integration with other Garmin fitness accessories. Apple/Google/Samsung watches are so capable they're basically tiny phones.

LOL wrong. go play with your apple toys.

Pictured: a couple of my "apple toys"

Garmin seems to be doing fairly well targeting people who want a simpler smartwatch with a focus on fitness and battery life. I don't don't know who you think you're benefitting by lying about their capabilities, but anyone who buys one on your recommendation expecting a feature rich device is going to be sorely disappointed.

It's not my fault you can't use technology. 🤷 Enjoy your toys.

I literally work at Garmin lmao. We don't need your help. You're not helping by lying about us.

He's full of shit, and the people upvoting him don't know anything about Garmin watches. Garmin doesn't compete with apple. They don't want to compete with apple. Garmin doesn't take the kitchen sink approach that apple/Google/Samsung do. They focus on fitness and battery life, they're competing with Fitbit. This liar is pulling the old "I like it, therefore it's the best at everything" trope. He's a child. Ignore him.

Like the thousand dollar basic monitor stand?

Or comparing similarly specced macs vs PCs (I bet that's why they moved away from x86 again, because it was too obvious how overpriced they were when the specs could be compared 1:1).

The thousand dollar monitor stand is not a consumer product and simply sold separately because not a lot of people are going to need it. The monitor it’s meant for is actually a lot cheaper than comparable monitors.

Or comparing similarly specced macs vs PCs

In the x86 era similarly specced PCs had similar prices or were even more expensive. The thing about Mac’s is that while you can get a PC that has some better specs for less, you couldn’t get anything that matched all the specs. It may have had a faster CPU, but would come in a crappy plastic case, weigh a ton and run out of battery in 30 seconds. Or it ran forever on a single charge but had a CPU that was slow as molasses.

(I bet that's why they moved away from x86 again, because it was too obvious how overpriced they were when the specs could be compared 1:1).

No, it’s because x86 is an overcomplicated mess with terrible performance/watt. x86 CPUs run hot, drain your battery and still don’t perform great. Apple’s M series SoC’s are amazing. A clean, modern ISA, high IPC, low power usage, low heat. It doesn’t matter if my MacBook Pro (M1 Max )runs on battery or wall power, it’s always blazing fast. It has insane battery life, does not get hot and is completely silent.

I was referring to the desktop space. Apple is a lot more competitive in the laptop space (unless you're a gamer), but their desktop specs always made me laugh at the price they ask for it. Granted, I haven't looked recently, but any time I've looked in the past, their price seems about 1k too high for what they are offering.

But yeah, x86 laptops are generally a shitshow. I had a decent personal one, though that was used more like a very portable desktop than a true laptop. That one just stopped charging one day (though its timing was impeccable because I was already in the process of moving my files to a new desktop I had just built, just had to pull the drives out to get the rest of it). And a cheap one I threw Linux on for school that did the job. But my first work laptop at my current job was garbage and the current one is relatively better, but also has a bunch of issues, enough that I don't think very highly of HP even ignoring their printer bs.

I was referring to the desktop space.

Is that still even a thing? Between hybrid working and flex desking, who still uses desktop PC’s?

Gamers and custom builders. We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn't able to keep up with the company's needs.

The very top of personal computing is still desktops. And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there's a premium you pay for the smaller package. Custom laptops are becoming more common but the size still limits choices you can make.

Gamers and custom builders.

Tiny niche market.

We also got some desktops at work to give our team some dedicated compute resources when our central system wasn't able to keep up with the company's needs.

We just run all that stuff in the cloud, much easier to scale up and down.

And even in the high end where laptops can compete, there's a premium you pay for the smaller package.

Yeah, but does it matter? You can get a decked out MacBook Pro for less than €5k, that’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things. You can’t bring a desktop computer into a meeting, or to a customer, or home for a work from home day.

For the same price as a decked out MacBook m3, you can get a laptop with a i9-13980hx. That beats the m3 max in single core cinebench by 12% and in multi core cinebench by 29%.

Also, the laptops at that price point have a dedicated gpu.

For the same price as a decked out MacBook m3, you can get a laptop with a i9-13980hx. That beats the m3 max in single core cinebench by 12% and in multi core cinebench by 29%.

And that laptop has a similar size, weight build quality, battery life, display resolution/peak brightness,etc ? Or is it a plastic fantastic 'luggable' behemoth that runs out in less than 2 hours and throttles almost immediately under load? Link to that mythical laptop please.

Also, the laptops at that price point have a dedicated gpu.

You say that like it's a good thing. Discrete GPUs suck, especially for GPGPU tasks. Not having unified memory is killing for performance in anything but games. Copying data to/from VRAM is slow and discrete GPUs have very limited VRAM. Even a 4090 only has 24GB. Meanwhile you can spec out an M2 MacBook with 96GB RAM and have almost all of that available to the GPU.

There definitely are good build quality laptops out there, like the Zephyrus lineup. Don't know about their latest releases, it would require a bit more research.

My own laptop is a 2022 model of zephyrus g15. It was released a few months before m2 released. The CPU is a Ryzen 9 6900HS, that is just 4-5% slower in cinebench, and a 3070-ti gpu. The GPU is 20% slower than m2 max, but the laptop also cost only 2.4k, compared to 3.1k of M2 max. The battery lasts around 4-5h during video playback on the dedicated GPU.

Haven't tested the energy saving method as I use it for work and I have locked it to max power settings.

Yes, the mac is more power efficient, but at the same time, if I wanted a power efficient, light laptop, I wouldn't buy a powerhouse.

Edit: oh, and the zephyrus laptop is actually lighter than 16" MacBook pro

There definitely are good build quality laptops out there, like the Zephyrus lineup

Sure there are. That was not my point. My point was that when you buy an x86 laptop that ticks all the boxes that a MacBook does, you pay a similar or higher price.

My own laptop is a 2022 model of zephyrus g15. It was released a few months before m2 released. The CPU is a Ryzen 9 6900HS, that is just 4-5% slower in cinebench, and a 3070-ti gpu. The GPU is 20% slower than m2 max, but the laptop also cost only 2.4k, compared to 3.1k of M2 max. The battery lasts around 4-5h during video playback on the dedicated GPU.

Let's compare it. Your laptop is a little cheaper, but it also has a 2560x1440 display with a peak brightness of 300 nits, compared to 3546x2234 with a peak of 1600 nits on a 16" MBPro. The MacBook has over twice the number of pixels and is over 5 times as bright. You get 4-5h video playback, the 16" MBPro gets 22 hours of video playback. The MBPro has 3 40Gbit Thunderbolt ports, yours has zero.

I'm not saying it's a bad machine, but the higher price of the MBPro is justified by what you get.

Haven’t tested the energy saving method as I use it for work and I have locked it to max power settings.

Yet another thing I don't have to waste any thoughts on, there is no such setting on the MBPro, it's fast and power efficient. It also never throttles and is always silent. Can you say the same?

I have a 14" M1 Max, it's driving 2 external displays (4k and a 5k2k) and is used as a development machine. I regularly run big compile jobs that really puts load on the system. I'm not sure if the fans even run, because I've never heard them.

Edit: oh, and the zephyrus laptop is actually lighter than 16" MacBook pro

Sure, it's 200 grams lighter but it's also a smaller laptop. 15.6" screen vs. 16.2" screen. The 14" model is lighter than the zephyrus with the exact same performance as the 16" model, just with a smaller screen and 'only' 17 hours of video playback on battery.

I can't relate to the value you place in them. You couldn't pay me to use Apple software.

With Windows or Linux, I spend a lot of my time operating the computer. On macOS I just spend my time on the tasks I was working on. The nice thing about Apple’s software is that it gets out of the way so you can focus on what actually matters.

That's only true if the Apple way works for you. If not it keeps getting in the way in infuriating ways.

I once bought an apple laptop, it lasted a couple months before I ran back to the comfort and productivity of Linux and kde.

It can take a bit of getting used to. The main thing I had to unlearn is expecting things to be complicated, when they aren’t.

That's debatable. And uncomplicated, assuming that it is, still didn't mean comfortable.

This can be absolutely true the other way around too, depending on how proficient you are, and what you are used to or find intuitive. For me, macOS is extremely unintuitive, for example, while my fully personalized Linux setup allows me to do what I want. It is very subjective, ultimately.

I’m very proficient in Linux. I used to run it as a desktop about 15 years ago, before I was able to afford a Mac. Still run it on the server, both personally and professionally. It’s come a long way, but it’s not nearly as polished as macOS.

Polished doesn't mean functional or ergonomic, which is something I value a lot. The ability to customize what I want easily is also something that Linux offers much more directly than macOS (which is the definition of getting in the way).

Again, I totally believe that for someone the Mac experience can be superior, but it depends on preference, use, habits and priorities.

What would you need to customize? IMO if you need to customize stuff that’s a failure. It should be right out of the box.

I want to customize all the keybindings for workspaces, since I want to create my own workflow. I think different people have different preferences. I am not looking for an out-of-the-box experience, but a setup I can make mine and opinionated. That's what I mean that it depends on personal requirements too.

That’s all? Easy to do on macOS, it’s right there in the settings menu.

Not to the level I can get with rofi and i3. The only way to get somewhat similar is to use yabai, which needs SIP disabled to have somewhat similar features.

A desktop linux user is not someone "very proficient"

You ran an install script.

I'm very proficient. It's my career.

It's also part of my career, and has been for the last 15+ years. I mentioned desktop use because that was way more challenging back then than it is today. I first started using Linux personally in '98 with S.u.S.E. 5.3, then moved to using it as my main OS about a year later. Damn, that's 25 years.... in my mind it feels less. I must be getting old. Used it in a professional capacity on the server since graduation.

4 years on macbooks as a software dev. Haven't seen a more annoying OS for power users than OSX. The Apple software is constantly in the way, breaking things or crashing because you plugged in a non apple certified keyboard.

crashing because you plugged in a non apple certified keyboard

Sure dude.

Yup. Also some kernel panics due to non compatible DP adapters. They are picky machines. Those issues were with the 2019 i7 mac pro. My current M1 has issues with certain usb-c docks

I think it's hilarious that you show proof of how overpriced Apple products are and there are still fanboys that down vote you.

I think it's sad. This corpo worship results in higher prices for all of us. Apple created this weird pseudo religion that makes other vendors (like Samsung) raising their prices more acceptable while competition should actually put prices under pressure.

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They notoriously sell older components and technologies in their brand new computers.

I have one I got for free that was made in 2020. It's a MacBook Air. It has 8gb of RAM... I don't even know how they found RAM chips that small in 2020. It freezes every day when all I'm doing is running a web browser. This computer was $1,000 at the time it launched.

The base amount of RAM is a bit low, I agree. But why would you order one with less RAM than you need? I have an M1 Max with 64GB and it just flies. No matter what I throw at it, it stays fast and responsive.

Them: theyve always been over priced, here's an example where their 1k device had a pathetically small ram for the cost

You: well why didn't you spend MORE to get a FUNCTIONING device, hmmm?

My cell phone in 2020 had more than 8g of ram and cost the same as that laptop, no excuses

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