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What You Need to Know About Apple's Emergency Satellite Feature for iPhone 14
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LOL, the Apple Watch Ultra isn’t big enough to have an antenna for Satellite communications. Perhaps if T-Mobile & Elon get their service going it could happen… but probably not. 🤢
oops no its not … yet anyway
us and canada only
Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone - Apple Support
With iPhone 14 or later, you can use Emergency SOS via satellite to text emergency services when you're off the grid with no cellular and Wi-Fi coverage.
But it prob will require iPhone 15 because the chip for a different satellite system might be different?
I wonder though like say if you don’t have the service and you are out in the middle of nowhere and need help is there anything you can do or do you just say crap I’m out of luck I didn’t sign up for the service Time to die?
Great whataboutism. One gets two years free and then has to decide to continue it or not.
What happens if you’re out stranded in the middle of nowhere without water? Your cell phone battery just died because you forgot to charge it and with no way to charge and no water what to do?
Fall detection doesn’t depend on a network of expensive satellites that someone is paying for.
"Random" preferences? There is nothing random about public policy. I don't think that, in the case of the US, even with that specific geographic and demographic setup, the problem is funding or capacity. I don't think that at all.
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i live in a city that is very remote and its possible to be out of reception within an hour’s drive. it’s often hundreds of km from one town to the next … so i pay to buy a garmin satellite communicator and yes i pay for a subscription. and i’m happy to pay - it may save my life.
if this is an important feature for your circumstances you’ll happily pay for the peace of mind
Better be southern Canada because the iPhone sat function works up to LAT 62. Above that, according to a call with Apple, it is "50/50" - at least here at Lat 64.8 (north pole, AK). I was totally onboard with getting a 14 until I realized how spotty the coverage could potentially be. I would not expect coverage in a steep valley with mountains to the south of course. Even InReach won't work then but for me it's a question of whether it is dependable - at all. If I thought I could reasonably depend on the sat coverage I'd get a 14 in a heart beat but I will wait for reports from others to learn how well it does or doesn't connect up here. If I learn that it's reasonably dependable I'll probably get it; it's the only feature that lures me. Otherwise I will be waiting for optical zoom and USB-C
There are a lot of features that are paid for by "someone". Like included 5GB of cloud storage, for example. If apple can afford to give this out free for 2 years, they must have it figured out.
So the relay centers and satellite communications should be given away for free because apple has figured out how to give away 5gb of iCloud storage?
Not exactly, but Apple can figure out how to do that. They can take a similar route to the cloud storage. I mean if apple figured out how to not include chargers in order to save the planet, I'm sure they can figure this out to in order to save lives.
Maybe they can, but they won’t. This is a subscription service that doesn’t seem to be headed into the free category.
i hope it’ll be free a rolled out worldwide. i currently pay garmin for this service, maybe apple sees this as another way to lock people in to its ecosystem.
with the ultra watch and this function, apple is going after garmin
A Swiss watch was once advertised with SARSAT.
It had meter antennas so that the satellite could hear the watch SAR signal. It was for one-time use, because there was no way to get the antennas back into the watch.
No, i mean someting like that: https://www.breitling.com/us-en/emergency/
The Swiss-made version has two 1-meter-long wire antennas, that had to be pulled out of the watch.
To interrupt the SOS signal, the antennae had to be cut off or wrapped around the watch
and that watch isn't for sell to everyone.
I pasted the wrong link! Will delete my reply above. That was what I meant to post.
It's possible said feature is effectively paid for by the upfront cost of the iPhone. Or you can think of it as a 2-year trial period (similar to how we got a free year of TV+ with the purchase of any Apple hardware when said service first launched). Who knows - maybe after two years, Apple may have acquired their own satellite service and can indeed afford to sustain the service for free indefinitely (kinda like how services like Maps and Siri don't bring in any revenue, but are considered a key part of their ecosystem).
My guess is that Apple will simply roll it into Apple One, as will any service that feels too specialised to warrant its own subscription fee, but Apple doesn't want to just give away for free like that.
I think the Satellite offering will either be added to the iCloud+ tier pricing or Apple will create a new Emergency Services tier. Hopefully, it gets added to the iCloud+ offering. I am not interested in paying $5 a month for such a service by itself.
Interestingly, the Breitling Emergency (I assume that's the watch you are referring to) had initially been banned for sale in the U.S. The watch, Emergency II, was eventually updated/improved to be able to transmit to COSPAS-SARSAT system.
It's seriously impressive!
I tend to look at it the opposite way. I think some peace of mind is nice. Last time I was on vacation in a mountainous part of Georgia (but still on paved roads) there many places where I had *zero* cell reception. With this if I needed to summon an ambulance for someone I could.
It would be fully in keeping with the rest of the world, though. If you don’t buy insurance, and you have an event where it would pay out, that’s not going to be there for you. If you want this kind of feature today, you’re buying a $300 dedicated Garmin mini-device and paying $14.95/month in service. Apple giving it free for two years (and after that, who knows, but maybe two years will come free with every phone purchase to help lock in that upgrade cycle) is already a huge step above what you can get from any competitor in the space.
We don’t want to pay for it, and yeah, some people won’t pay for it and will be in a situation where they wish they had, but I wouldn’t say Apple is acting in bad faith or even poor taste; it’s significantly cheaper (read “free”) than competing services and you don’t need extra specialized hardware with you beyond your phone.