The late-night email to Tim Cook that set the Apple Watch saga in motion

Masimo's goal, people close to the matter say, was for the ITC to impose its ban in the summer

At about 1 a.m. California time in 2013, a scientist emailed Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook with an irresistible pitch.  

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“I strongly believe that we can develop the new wave of technology that will make Apple the No. 1 brand in the medical, fitness and wellness market,” he wrote in the email, which was later included in legal documents. Some 10 hours after the message was sent, an Apple recruiter was in touch. And just weeks after that, the engineer was working at the tech company on a smartwatch with health sensors.

A flurry of activity began. Within a few months at Apple, the employee asked the company to file about a dozen patents related to sensors and algorithms for determining a person’s blood-oxygen level from a wearable device. But this wasn’t just any engineer. He had been the chief technical officer of Cercacor Laboratories Inc., the sister company of Masimo Corp., which went on to get the US to ban the Apple Watch.

Apple’s decision to hire this technical whiz — a Stanford engineering Ph.D. named Marcelo Lamego — is seen as the spark that sent Masimo’s lawyers after Apple. While the iPhone maker denies it did anything wrong, Masimo cited the poaching of employees as part of claims that the iPhone maker infringed its patents.

The dispute culminated this month in Apple having to pull its latest watches from the company’s US stores, hobbling a business that generates roughly $17 billion in annual sales. A US appellate court Wednesday temporarily halted the ban on sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. The company responded by putting the products back on shelves in some of its US retail stores Wednesday, with online sales to resume Thursday.

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Masimo, a relatively obscure maker of medical devices based in Irvine, California, argues that Lamego seized its prized asset — the ability to noninvasively and accurately capture the level of oxygen in a person’s blood — and took it to Apple. The feature ultimately helped turn the watch into more of a health device, solidifying its status as the wearable industry’s best-selling product.