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This is a business that Apple should get into as well. They have the capital and Phones+internet would have great vertical synergy.
by onedognight 7y ago
This is a business that Apple should get into as well. They have the capital and Phones+internet would have great vertical synergy.
- martythemaniak 7y agoWhat they don't have is the rockets. SpaceX has cheap reusable Falcon 9s. Blue Origin is aiming to have a cheap reusable New Glenn in 2021. Apple would have to go with much more expensive traditional launchers.
- waiseristy 7y agoWhy would Apple not be able to buy Falcon 9 launches? SpaceX is in the business of selling rocket launches.
- kjksf 7y agoThey could but I'm guessing SpaceX margins on rocket launches are ~50% (to make it economical in the face of risk of blowing up billion-dollar payloads). Which means that if Apple pays $60 million for a single launch, it costs SpaceX $30 million to do it. Or to put it differently: if Apple was competing with SpaceX, then every Apple launch would sponsor one SpaceX launch. With those economics, it would be hard for Apple (or anyone else) to compete with SpaceX in this business. All else being equal, their cost to create the satellite network would be substantially bigger which means they would have to charge more or have much lower margins and profits than SpaceX.
- BurningFrog 7y agoRight. This seems a lot like a strategy to use/monetize spare launch capacity.
- pinewurst 7y agoRemember though that Blue Origin is a completely separate corporation from Amazon. That makes me wonder if a Amazon-Blue Origin tie up would be consider self-dealing which is strongly frowned upon.
- positr0n 7y agoI don't think the frequencies these satellite ISPs are using is conducive to directly interacting with a phone. The antenna/receiver unit for Starlink will be the size of a pizza box according to SpaceX. Physics limits how much you can shrink the antenna (due to the wavelength).