I love the idea, but I can’t imagine there’s enough room on the watch for a satellite antenna. Perhaps if they used fixed Watch Bands with the antenna inside? 🤷
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Apple's Emergency SOS via Satellite Feature Saves Family Caught in Maui Wildfires
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Well…capitalism as currently implemented blows. Too much croneyism and lack of understanding by the people who are supposed to be providing oversight.
I still think there’s room for someone with Apple’s money and power to make the right decisions. But the incentives are all screwed up right now. Wall street is like a crack dealer and everyone is hooked. Chasing that quarterly dragon.
I don’t see anyone bashing the car companies for charging for emergency services. You need a plan for their automatic crash detection
It's a matter of image. Someone dying because Apple says "You didn't pay up" would not look good. My impression is that Apple will find some way of making this free or maybe 99p a month. And keeping it free would be a good selling point.
People are smarter than that to go off in a direction of throwing the blame on apple instead of understanding that life’s choices are personal responsibility.
We dont really know what apple will or won’t do at this price.
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For sure. But half the fun in this forum is speculating about what pple will or won't do. More hopes than facts.
Some people will no doubt argue it was Apple's fault since they didn't continue to give away the service. To me, if Apple were to charge, it's the same as what automakers do with their emergency services. if you choose not to subscribe, that's fine and yo accept the risk.
If I were Apple, I'd simply estimate the annual costs and raise the worldwide price of iPhones to cover it and build up some additional cash to cover unexpected costs.
Other options would be to add it the AppleCare+ or as part of the services bundle to help drive AppleCare+ or services uptake.
This is more an issue of PR than economics. Apple could easily fold the cost of the service into any number of incomes, from the cost of the phone to the cost of add-on services. Satellite SOS will be one of those features, like fall detection, that most people aren't aware of. So Apple should just give it away. The cost is (comparatively) minimal and the PR is good. I can already imagine the commercials they could write.
So, what evidence do you have that providing an emergency service that is initially available for free (but charged later if a person can afford to pay) would overwhelm the infrastructure? First, infrastructure can be enhanced through both private an public investment. Second, this would be emergency use only - I assume that using any publicly funded satellite emergency service frivolously would be illegal and subject to fines. Moreover, it would be simple programming to block use of a public emergency satellite system if the cellular network was available. How would the occasional emergency call swamp the system?
Also, you expressed your opinion about those who believe in government. Now let me express mine. The anti-government crowd fail to understand that public spending is often best understood as investment in people and infrastructure. It is hard to estimate the value of a life lost, but US airlines typically compensate about $5 million for the death of a person during one of their flights (see https://www.keystonelaw.com/keynotes/how-is-compensation-calculated-after-an-aviation-accident). Let us take that as a crude estimate of the economic value of a person - saving just one life would pay for a lot of emergency calls.
At the end of the day, I probably wouldn't mind and I never go off the grid. But you never know. After hurricane Sandy my neighborhood lost power for 4 days, meaning no cell service and no internet.
I can just imagine the scenario of Apple providing satellite SOS for free and raising the cost of the iPhones $99. There would be more backlash from that than some hypothetical, as yet not happened , situation where someone allegedly dies because they chose not to renew their satellite subscription.
Or Apple could just eat the cost. Or get back the wholesale cost of the system from somewhere else. I just think it would be good PR.
Apple spend money out of pocket to make this happen. While it’s within the realm of possibility, my guess is they are not eating the cost as they don’t need the good PR. Apple being at 2-3T says all that has to be said about PR.
For all new cars in the EU that even is mandatory. If you disable it, you are not allowed to use the car.
So the government should pay for car insurance? Most states require drivers to be insured.
Reasonable but not practical, I’m afraid. Governments usually offload costs to consumers.
Any smart company has baked the lifetime costs of service estimate into the cost of the car.
I'm OK with that.
People will balk at that. While it differentiates them from the competition, which offers nothing AFAIK similar to this. Any price hikes that are deemed too high will bring bad press IMHO. Since you could have to support that feature for say 5 or more years per device. Could be too costly to pass on to everyone buying an iPhone.
I like this idea. It ties it to a time limit for the service. And at a price point that you can choose to pay for if you want it. Plus Apple usually provides 90 days free. So the sticker shock could be postponed when making a new iPhone purchase. I'd imagine at least $25 for this. Since it should be a rare occurrence to need to use it. An additional $50 max for the 3 years of AppleCare+ on any device that supports SAT communication.
I'm not sure it would take much of a price hike, especially if you add o all units sold, not just the ones where you can actually use satellite SOS. An actuary could estimate the total costs for the service over the typical life span of a phone and thus a cost could be divided amongst unit volume of iPhones. Each user would pay a small price for having the service available, since most users won't ever use it and thus it is easily made available to all.
I'd just add it in, not as an add-on option, to ll phone sol worldwide as part of AC. That way, he overall cost per phone is low and for those who travel they are covered if they are in a satellite service area.
To me, the key is amortizing the costs over as large a user base as possible.
We don't really know the cost. Your $99 may be wildly inflated. I'm in the camp of just making it an included service and make for some good PR.
Because that makes the cost per user low enough so that it is available as part of the cost of the phone, just as warranties are included in the price even though most users never need them.
In the end, it would be an accounting decision as to how the liability is handled; Apple could actually only incur a liability for phones sold in some areas but raise prices across the board by teh anticipated total amount, so while the margin would be different the bottom line is the same.
However, since most uses will never use the service the cost per phone, based on actuarial analysis, would be relatively low when spread over all sold phones.
I disagree with that guess. A behavioral economist might argue that by including the cost of service taht may never be used but would be priceless when needed would be a way to avoid people declining it because they thought they would never need it and ensuring it was available when needed and thus helping drive good behaviors.
Amortization is the write down of an intangible asset over the expected life. If the cost per phone was expected to be say $20 over a 5 average life, $4 would be written down, i.e. no longe a liability, much as warranty cost estimates are handled.
In this case, I would look at it not as a service but a liability that needs to be accounted for, just as a warranty is a liability that is accounted for wen keeping the books; since you are potentially incurring costs that become less as the device ages.
I suspect the ultimate decision will be cost vs PR value, and as long as it remains relatively small coverage Apple may just write it of as a cost and take a small margin hit.
It’s nice to hear that such a feature on iPhone is capable of saving lives ! Only reading the text messages made me feel how dangerous the situation must have been.. 😧 I hope they’re all okay right now.