I also wonder if Apple will keep doing that. Like if you go from an iPhone 14 to an iPhone 16, are you going to get another two years free?

Being downvoted for being reasonable and not hysterical.

It is not "essentially 100% coverage" - far from it.

It's interesting because some dedicated emergency satellite devices actually work like that. My Garmin Inreach warns me every time I start it up that it will not do an emergency SOS call if I don't have an active subscription.

If you are scrolling down the feed and only see the top half of the thumbnail picture, you can see the best viewing angle.

Wow two years of free service is nice. I was just thinking it's such a useful feature but if you don't pay for it and get lost you can't just simply activate it lol. Hmm.

Dragonfly.

Apple says it's free for two years from when you get the phone, and hasn't said anything about how much it'll cost after that period. I bet they haven't decided yet, because... well, they won't have to deal with it for another year and a half at this point.

How much is this SOS feature on iPhones? I believe I heard it's free trail for the iPhone 14 but there is a subscription fee from what I recall.

So a basic LED TVs can do 1000 nits and high end ones can do 4000. Viewing angles of 170 degrees are common. What is so spectacular here?

^^

If I’m going out on a dangerous expedition, I’ll bring a beacon. Something designed to be reliable at one single thing of sending out SOS.

I don’t trust my phone to work, or not break, or contact the right people if I’m actually worried about a deathly trip to the wilderness.

Who cares? Honestly, if I lived the type of life where I'd frequently need a backup feature like this, I sure as shit would have a dedicated device for it and would absolutely not be relying on my phone for it.

The same apple's emergency feature that doesn't work but in the US and the other 4 countries out of the 195 ?

This i agree with.

A couple. Out of how many incidents in the world? Like I'm happy that people got saved, but to act like this feature is so revolutionary is blowing the feature out of proportion a whole hell of a lot. No one is gonna switch from android to iPhone to get this feature when you can buy an emergency transponder that also connects to satellites for a couple hundred bucks. Like, it's a nice feature to have, but it's moreso a "huh, neat" than a "this is the only reason I will buy this phone"

Android fan boys stop acting like this feature is so dumb, it's objectively a good feature, and Apple fan boys stop acting like this is the greatest feature ever. It's a good feature, but it's not that good.

Do they still? I think that was replaced by Emergency Mode and my S22 Plus lost it when I updated to oneui 5 and there doesn't seem to be anything equivalent anymore :(

How in the hell is a satellite emergency phone so useful that you use the feature as a comparison point in the same way you would use a headphone jack? 911 already routes through any signal regardless so you would have to be out of reception from ANY cell phone tower, which means that help is probably not coming fast even if you did call for it.

They are giving it for free for two years, after that you'll have to subscribe to it. Realistically, who will subscribe to it?

And their crash detection has thousands of false alerts.

The hardware in the iPhone and features are literally just Globalstar's SPOT tracker with an Apple UI. The Spots start at like $150 and have monthly service starting at $17/month, much more attainable than a satellite phone and are relatively common with a more casual market of hikers, backpackers, etc. It's only good for calling emergency services and sending "I'm OK" and location check-in messages to loved ones, the InReach and similar products that attach to phones to give them satellite capabilities are a better comparison to emergency SOS via satellite, than a full-on satellite phone with full voice calls is.

So while I agree with you, the iPhone is also the first consumer phone in history to include it, right? Like, we all just went out into the woods without satellite phones in the past and took that risk. It'd definitely be a nice feature to know you had in your pocket just in case, but at the same time I'm not seeing it as a deal breaker until there's mass adoption of something like that.

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Scary to think we use to live in an age without Apples emergency SOS.

I use to go outside in fear to just grab the paper, the peace of mind I get with my new iPhone has changed my life.

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Yeah, I'm thinking a cell phone satellite Sos system isn't to blame, still. But thanks.