Apple’s $634 Million Masimo Verdict Stands, but Danaher Gets the Money

Apple must pay Masimo $634 million after all. A federal judge in California rejected the company’s bid to overturn a jury’s patent verdict and denied its request for a brand new trial. U.S. District Judge James V. Selna’s ruling, handed down this week, leaves the November 2025 verdict fully intact.

The company that actually collects the money is not the one that spent six years building the case. Masimo sold itself to diagnostics conglomerate Danaher for $9.9 billion in June, six weeks before Selna’s ruling locked in the payout.

Judge Selna Says the Apple Watch Counts as a Patient Monitor

Apple asked Selna for two things: a judgment wiping out the verdict outright, and failing that, a new trial. He said no to both.

Apple’s central argument was that the Apple Watch could never infringe Masimo’s patent because the device does not qualify as a “patient monitor,” the term at the core of Patent No. 10,433,776. Apple wanted that term limited to hospital-grade equipment. Selna disagreed. He ruled that the patent’s broader, everyday meaning could reasonably stretch to cover a consumer smartwatch, siding with the jury that found the Apple Watch’s heart rate monitoring and notification features infringed the patent.

Apple’s fallback request, a new trial, rested on three separate objections. Selna rejected each one.

• Claim construction – Apple argued the court defined “patient monitor” too broadly; Selna found the definition sound.
• Jury instructions – Apple said jurors were given flawed guidance; Selna found no error serious enough to matter.
• Excluded testimony – Apple wanted a do-over after one of its own experts was barred from testifying; Selna denied that too.

Masimo issued a statement calling the verdict a significant win back in November, and this week’s ruling means that win survives Apple’s first real attempt to erase it.

Danaher, Not Masimo, Will Cash Apple’s Check

Here is the part most coverage of Selna’s ruling has skipped. Masimo, the company that sued Apple in 2020 and spent six years fighting it in court, no longer exists as an independent business.

Danaher Corporation, a Washington-based science and diagnostics conglomerate, agreed in February 2026 to buy Masimo for $180 a share in cash, an enterprise value of roughly $9.9 billion. Masimo shareholders approved the merger agreement in May, and Danaher completed its acquisition of Masimo on June 10. Masimo stock stopped trading on the Nasdaq that same day. The company now operates as a standalone unit inside Danaher’s Diagnostics segment.

The numbers around that deal put Apple’s payment in perspective.

• $9.9 billion is the enterprise value Danaher paid for Masimo, funded with cash on hand.
• June 10, 2026 is the day the acquisition closed and Masimo shares were delisted.
• $530 million-plus is the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) Danaher expects Masimo to generate in 2027, based on the deal’s disclosed pricing multiple.
• $124 billion is Danaher’s own market capitalization, more than twelve times what it paid for Masimo.

Apple’s stock barely moved when the $634 million verdict first landed last November, closing up nearly 2% against a company worth roughly $4 trillion. For Danaher’s new diagnostics subsidiary, the same sum is real money, arriving just weeks after the ink dried on a multibillion dollar acquisition.

Joe Kiani Spent $60 Million and Got Ousted First

Joe Kiani, Masimo’s founder and longtime chief executive, is the person who put the lawsuit in motion in early 2020. According to Forbes, Kiani personally spent $60 million fighting Apple in court over the years that followed.

He will not be the one collecting on the verdict. Activist investor Politan Capital Management, which built roughly a 9% stake in Masimo, spent two years pushing for board seats and challenging Kiani’s leadership, pointing to a costly consumer audio acquisition and an underperforming stock. Shareholders sided with Politan at a September 2024 vote, and Kiani, who had led Masimo since founding it in 1989, was pushed out.

Katie Szyman took over as Masimo’s chief executive. It was under her leadership, more than a year after Kiani’s exit, that the jury handed down the $634 million verdict in November 2025, and it was her signature on the statement welcoming Danaher’s acquisition seven months later. The founder who bankrolled the fight left the building before the biggest check of the whole legal war was ever written.

Six Years, Multiple Courts, One Smartwatch

The patent verdict Selna just upheld is only one front in a fight that has sprawled across district court, a federal trade agency, an appeals court and a separate state’s courtroom.

The pattern repeats: Masimo wins the money fights, Apple wins small procedural points, and nobody has landed a knockout. The Delaware jury that heard Apple’s countersuit found Masimo’s own W1 and Freedom smartwatches infringed two Apple design patents, but awarded only the statutory minimum and found no infringement of any Apple utility patent. Masimo also never secured a permanent sales ban on the Apple Watch itself. Apple pulled blood oxygen monitoring from the Series 9 and Ultra 2 in January 2024, then brought it back the following year in a redesigned form that calculates results on a paired iPhone and displays them in the Health app.

Can Apple Still Get Out of Paying?

Apple says it plans to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the same court already handling its fight over the Masimo import ban. Selna’s denial of both post-trial requests appears to close off Apple’s normal path back through district court, though Apple has shown no shortage of willingness to keep testing new angles in this dispute.

When Law360 asked Apple for comment on this week’s ruling, the company pointed back to an earlier statement rather than issuing a new one.

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 Apple spokesperson made that statement.

Federal Circuit appeals of this kind typically run about 18 months from filing to decision, which means a final resolution on the money is still a long way off. The fight over blood oxygen monitoring carries different stakes because the patents there have not expired. Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School professor, told Bloomberg Law the still-active patents in the import ban case “could hit Apple’s sales by constraining Apple Watch functionality,” unlike the expired patent behind the $634 million judgment.

The jury’s number has not changed since November. Only the name on the account cashing it has.