And they explored how Swiss watchmakers had made complicated gears to tick off minutes, a craft upended in the 1970s by the arrival of quartz crystals and a battery-powered revolution. They synchronized the history lesson with purchases of some of the world’s finest watches. The orders were routed through a shell company called Avolonte Health, a startup Apple had created in a nearby medical office complex where its engineers were secretly at work on the noninvasive blood glucose–monitoring technology from Rare Light. Such covert businesses were sprinkled around the peninsula, enabling Apple
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