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Apple's Emergency SOS via Satellite Feature Saves Family Caught in Maui Wildfires
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This is the type of stuff that Apple engineers work their azz off for. Congrats to their team!
My eyes got wet reading the text! In 1987 while in the California National Guard, I worked the Happy Camp fire and felt firsthand the heat of a wildfire.
OnStar and other companies have spun it successfully before, I wouldn't put it past Apple (sadly).
Ok so raise the iPhone price by a dollar and it’s paid for yearly.
Yes, a life-saver, literally. What's happening in Maui is heartbreaking. I was fortunate enough to visit Lahaina some years back, and it's crushing that it will never be the same again.
Not sure about the EU, but in the US you need a cell phone and service to even call 911. 911 maybe "free" but, getting to use it requires you to spend money on the phone service.
They may very well be working on a way to make this free. But, SAT phone service isn't cheap. Even though this is just text based messaging. Someone is going to want to get paid for it.
The cost of leasing capacity on a satellite network for this cannot be cheap, however as people have mentioned, it is a PR disaster if Apple outright blocks use without a paid subscription. I think their best bet will be to build it into the cost of the iPhone.
The iPhone 13 and (almost?) all current Android phones are going to become illegal in the EU?
Sadly, it's a tradition here.
People feel good/better after having a good jab at Apple.
I think the cost of the satellite service is not so far different from the cost of running the massive server farms required to provide all the iCloud services that are free to the user.
I don’t think you can text, but you can send location via satellite from find my to any contact. Not sure why they appear to have omitted including a reason for having sent the location… even 20 ASCII characters would be better than nothing.
911 in the US works on any cell phone that is powered on and able to connect to a cell phone tower. No SIM card required. If you take the card out of a phone it will show “emergency call only.” To hint towards this.
If they didn’t want to open up the obvious moral question of is it correct to let someone die unable to contact help due to not paying a fee, they probably shouldn’t have pursued this technology. I don’t think anyone can make a good faith argument here that it is “right” under any situation to allow this to happen. If it takes the government taking over this system to make it be available on all phones with the hardware for free, then it should happen, and fast.
I can only speak for Germany. Here you can call the emergency services with any cellphone without even having a SIM card. Phones without a SIM card even display "Only emergency calls".
Then the government should take the service off their hands and operate it on taxpayer money. Simple. I don’t see why you see this as a gotcha, this is no different than “forcing” AT&T to connect emergency calls on phones with no service while the government handles the rest. Garmin sells plenty of watches and car GPS units, they will live. I don’t think it has ever been right to do this, but it is even worse to do it on an everyday device.
Unfortunately in the USA you'll find a significant number of people who don't want the government dictating that mobile phone operators should spend extra money (passed onto the customer) for a service such as that.
This same logic would apply to emergency satellite calling.
If you tried to pitch free 911 calls today, some people would be against it. That does not mean it is right.
Apple has never offered to pay for this, nor is it expected. If you call 911, AT&T or Verizon or TMobile doesn’t pay for your rescue, police, ambulance, etc, they just send the call along to the goverment. The US already does search and rescue within its borders if you manage to get a call through or you’re missing long enough. This argument is absurd.
Such a foreign concept for sure, if only we had a blueprint for it that had been in operation for decades… I wonder if it could be called by typing 3 numbers into any cell phone… 733? 822? Can’t quite recall…
I don’t think I ever implied they should give it away for free forever. However, if the 88 million dollar figure is true, that’s a rounding error for Apple, and the lives saved and the good pr on this are priceless.
But like I said, they could easily pay for it in other ways without people actually having to subscribe to it, because as you know, many won’t, or will forget, and then it’s pr nightmare time when someone dies because they didn’t subscribe. Bake it into the cost of the phone, that way everyone has it without the need to subscribe and lives get saved and Apple continues getting the good pr for it. And nobody is any wiser that they are even paying for it.
Not true in US. You do not need a cell plan to call 911. Any old phone can call 911 even without a cell service provider.
Gotta stop you right there cowboy, Apple isn’t paying for your Amazon rescue mission, they are simply providing a way for you to contact emergency services. So once you’re rescued you can sort out what if anything you might owe to the Brazilian authorities.
The situation for emergency terrestrial calls in the US is the same, I have heard of no significant number of people not wanting it.
Didn’t they sell over 200 million phones last year? That’s less than a dollar per phone.
This is just 911 for areas where there’s no cell service, it’s gonna cost the same to rescue people no matter how they contact authorities.
In the era of incremental upgrades that are barely worth the effort, it's very rare that a new feature is so important that it saves lives. Bravo Apple!
Cell phone towers are not owned by the government. I have no idea what you’re even talking about here. Apple is only employing a middleman to receive the satellite communications and forward them to emergency services, with cooperation between Apple and the goverment they could get these messages sent directly to emergency services. If the US has to pay the owners of the satellites for these communications they should, just like they have an agreement with the cell phone providers for calls on their towers. I am not expecting a Tim Cook task force to fly out on a helicopter and make sure I have a good morning.
It would be a ridiculous outrage because again, nobody seriously gripes that your carrier doesn’t pay for your rescue if you manage to call for help within their cell service range. In fact, this could happen right now under the 2 year free period for iPhone 14 owners. Apple isn’t paying for their rescue, that is between the person needing rescue and the people who rescued them. All they do is connect you to rescuers.