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After 2 years: I hope they offer a "pay later" option (does not mean it has to be cheap). You never know when you are in emergency situations and you maybe need
by therealmarv 4y ago
After 2 years: I hope they offer a "pay later" option (does not mean it has to be cheap). You never know when you are in emergency situations and you maybe need this kind of new technology.
Imagine people could be saved in theory (and die) but not in practice because they did not paid their emergency subscription.
And even worse: Imagine you could pay later but you don't use that option because you want to save money oO
A lot of ethical problems in my opinion.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoThat issue already exists--without a subscription my inReach becomes nothing but an inferior GPS. When it powers up it even warns you that the SOS capability does not work without a subscription.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoApple: Certainly, you can pay another two years, by buying an iPhone 16 Pro.
- jbverschoor 4y agoPlus 3 months of Apple TV
- Etheryte 4y agoYou have to look at the business side of things, too. Apple has to pay a lot of money to whoever is managing and maintaining the satellites behind this and if you only ever pay when you need it you might not never pay at all. The correct mindset to have about this is that it's like insurance — you can't pick up insurance only after the fact when you need it, otherwise all insurance providers would be broke.
- cowsup 4y agoNot just the satellites, but they also said that, due to the slow speeds involved in the satellites, Apple will employ people who will be able to step in the middle of you and EMS, to help get information to them faster and answer relevant questions, without having to rely on you receiving/answering them using your device. The cost of this team alone will be huge.
- jerlam 4y agoThis is probably an expansion of the same Globalstar team that services SOS messages from their own SPOT satellite messengers, which also use the same satellite network. The SPOT plans and the competing Garmin inReach plans are not cheap: https://www.findmespot.com/en-us/products-services/service-plans https://www.findmespot.com/en-us/products-services/service-p... https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461 https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gumby 4y agoAnd if you make a SPOT call nobody may be out there for a while. I looked into getting one just in case. Where I like to camp, in BLM land, SPOT calls the "local" 911 responder which is 2.5 hours away and run by CHP. Back then they said it can take up to 72 hours for someone to get a team together to look for you. The owners of the backpacking store I went to, whom I know, said it wouldn't be worth my money. I imagine there's better coverage in a national park though.
- tjohns 4y agoEven in a national park, it will take time to respond to a satellite call. Contrary to popular belief, search and rescue doesn't always send a helicopter. It's still common to send a ranger on foot and help walk somebody out on the trail. Or if that's not possible, to take a team of humans and carry someone out on a litter. More generally... From what I was trained, ~12 hours is considered a fast rescue. The average time (according to the FAA's pilot survival training) is 31 hours, even with a known good location fix. 72 hours is very possible if there's inclement weather or difficulty locating someone.
- cameldrv 4y agoIt seems like this is a big advantage of the inreach in that you can text with EMS to convey if it is an urgent situation. You can also text friends/family to make alternate arrangements if the regular rescue people aren’t going to be fast enough.
- nicknow 4y agoWhat you would hope is that there is a small monthly fee (say a few bucks) to have the service and then a "usage fee" for the random unlikely time you use the service. So imagine paying $2 a month to have the service on and then $75 each time you use it. Use it once every 3 years (which seems like a lot for the intended user base) and it's only ~$4 a month. And that seems about right compared to SPOT monthly pricing, considering it's intended for much greater usage than one time every 3 years.
- dghlsakjg 4y agoI pay spot ~$12/month for unlimited satellite tracking on a 10 minute interval on what I believe is the same network.
- post_break 4y agoThe garmin gps you can pay only the months you need it.
- fastball 4y agoI'm assuming this will be the same – a monthly subscription that you can pause whenever and turn on for months when you are hiking in the wilderness, on your boat etc.
- jakeinspace 4y agoIt’s a bit different from insurance, in that the benefit to the user of contacting police/rescue could be nearly infinite, while the marginal cost to Apple is small. So as long as the after-the-fact charge is high enough, Apple can amortize their costs. The main issue is it’s terrible PR for Apple to be sending $1000 bills to people who’ve been mauled by bears or gotten lost in the mountains, many of whom wouldn’t be able to pay anyway.
- runeks 4y ago> The main issue is it’s terrible PR for Apple to be sending $1000 bills to people who’ve been mauled by bears or gotten lost in the mountains, many of whom wouldn’t be able to pay anyway. Just hook it up to Apple Pay. “Pay $1000 to make an emergency call” /s
- smilespray 4y agoHard to authorize payment with Face ID when your face has been eaten by a bear.
- hbn 4y ago> The main issue is it’s terrible PR for Apple to be sending $1000 bills to people who’ve been mauled by bears or gotten lost in the mountains Is it any better PR if there are stories out there of bodies found starved to death in the wilderness equipped with an iPhone that has the hardware capabilities to contact emergency services, but couldn't because the person didn't pay Apple life insurance
- randyrand 4y agoThey could charge $50k for 1 day of use after the fact, and people would still be happy for that option. Rescues are not cheap to begin with.
- bradleybuda 4y agoHaha no, they would call the literally space-age thing that saved their lives "price gouging" and point as Apple's profits as evidence that every human is entitled to this service for free.
- adastra22 4y agoEvery human is entitled for this service. This should be free, like GPS.
- dymk 4y agoIf the government was running it, maybe.
- nickpp 4y agoEven government-run services cost money (usually much more than private ones). And the government gets its money from us, not from the sky.
- ChadNauseam 4y agoYeah, but the government can collect money via taxes, which allows it to solve coordination problems that would be more difficult for private companies to solve.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoThe birds aren't cheap, the rescue coordination centers (they know who to talk to, they have no ability to actually go into the field--although that's not always needed. Garmin recently mentioned one--SOS comes in "found lost child". 25 minutes later, SOS comes in "lost child"; all they had to do is direct them to where the other was) have to be staffed--and both are private.
- dzhiurgis 4y agoGov should subsidise it for everyone, not just Apple and Globestar. Emergency beacons should be given for free at every park. Thats a massive cost saving in terms of search and lost lives.
- cjrp 4y agoIt might lead to _more_ search costs; people head off into sketchy situations safe in the knowledge that if they press a little button a SAR helicopter will be scrambled.
- ghaff 4y agoWhich it almost certainly won’t be. A SAR team will probably be dispatched when it is safe to do so. Which may take a day or more. It’s a limitation of a personal locator beacon. It had better be a real emergency and even then you have to wait. Location fixes may also not always be reliable.
- dividedbyzero 4y agoI don't think that comparison holds. What Apple is doing is making a crucial rescue tool, the distress beacon, near-ubiquitous. In a few years, any major-ish emergency involving people rich enough to own iPhones will have a working distress beacon around. This isn't like an InReach that you get and subscribe because you expect you might end up in an emergency, this is something that'll be around without even an awareness of danger and the optics of letting that potential go to waste carry a cost as well. Imagine a plane goes down in a remote area, a dozen iPhones on board but no one got the subscription. They might even end up eating the costs for genuine distress calls just for the marketing value of the iPhone saving hundreds of lives a year, or they might just charge a large sum for non-subscription distress calls and eat the cost in case the bear got there first. Besides, if they included a few tweet-sized non-emergency text messages and location updates a day in a reasonably priced subscription, I bet that would sell like hotcakes in outdoorsy circles. People bring their phone anyway, so 2-3 iPhones on your party might make the InReach redundant. I'd love that.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoI wouldn't say it would make the inReach redundant, although it's going to take a substantial bite out of the low end of the market. I pay extra for unlimited pings on a 10 minute interval--even if I can't call for help when I'm reported overdue they'll know where I am. I also think my inReach can take a lot more abuse than an iPhone. I also think it will drive the satellite guys to offer a different service--SOS only, you pre-pay a fixed price that doesn't expire. (Actually, we already have a limited version of this--personal locator beacons have no monthly cost but have to be sent in for refurbishment if used. They are highly reliable but carry nothing but ID and GPS, you can't alter the message.)
- cowsup 4y agoEven a “pre-pay for a day of help” would be great. You could spend $100 in January, and keep that credit on file; then, if you need help in September, you can start up your 24-hour window. But given the era of recurring subscription revenue above all else, I think we know how Apple will handle this.
- lxgr 4y agoSo basically, pre-pay your home insurance for a day of fire?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- michaelmrose 4y agoIt's more like pre-pay your fire insurance or fire fighters will let your house burn which has already been tried.
- jrockway 4y agoI agree that insurance is maybe not the best analogy. You need satellite capacity to send one text message. When your house burns down, you need potentially hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. The satellites are expensive, of course, but most traffic is not cell phone users needing to be rescued.
- randyrand 4y agoPutting up Satellites is pretty much a fixed cost. It's not like insurance. Apple is not paying for your rescue. The text costs maybe $0.25 to send. A 1 time upfront access fee, to cover satellite fixed costs, plus a per-use fee to cover marginal costs. Subscription-only leaves money on the table.
- randyrand 4y agoAlso, you know, it is possible to pre-pay insurance. Right?
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
- mc32 4y agoThat’s already the case with most types of insurance. It ran out? You haven’t paid bills? and your house was hit by a tornado right after it ran out? Tough luck. That said it may have a “using this feature binds you to a new agreement where you pay for all the time you discontinued our service”
- prepend 4y agoI don’t think insurance is a good analog because insurance has very high payouts. Not sure the cost for this feature but the marginal cost is likely really low. So a day of coverage would maybe cost a few cents or dollars since they are already including 2 years free without raising the price. This is very different from a day of homeowners insurance where the payout is hundreds of thousands or millions. The marginal cost on insurance is very high.
- croon 4y agoThis is different from insurance in that insurance has very few, but large payouts shared by many small cost subscriptions. But it is like insurance in that it is a (likely very) large upfront cost for Apple that needs to be shared by many small subscriptions. If no one has to pay for it until they need it, the venture from Apple's side goes in the red. Disclaimer: Speculating on the likely economy of it, I don't know.
- michaelmrose 4y agoInsurance is to make you whole financially after the fact not to response to a life and death emergency in the moment. This theory has been tried in at least one location wherein you were expected to pay annually for fire service or the fire department wouldn't put out your house and would instead insure that the fire didn't spread to the paying customers while they watched your home burn. It's abhorrent. We ensure cell phones can always call 911 even without a plan for instance which unlike insurance is a nearly identical situation. The logical thing to do is just take it out of the hands of service providers by always requiring carriage of such a call in all circumstances and expecting OEMs/service providers to make back that money on device or service wherein such a device includes that function.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- patricknomad 4y agoT-Mobile and Starlink announced a partnership to offer call/texting/data usage when outside of cell coverage. They mentioned this would be free for premium plans and paid for lower cost plans. Apple uses high orbit satellites for SOS and "Find My" limited to iPhones; Starlink/T-Mobile would use low orbit satellites not limited to for SOS/calling/texting/data ("Find My") for any brand/model phone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHydPCYHmLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHydPCYHmLE
- Operyl 4y agoYup, the big difference is that Apple's high orbit sats are currently already there via Globalstar, with service starting in November. Whereas T-Mobile + Starlink is "sometime" and we're not sure exactly when as far as I can see. It'll be cool when it is available though!
- PostOnce 4y agoOnce it's viable because people are paying for other sat services, we can legislate that emergency sat calls be free no matter what, just like 911 / 111 / etc are now. (which is possible because people pay for other cell services, and don't solely use 911)
- notatoad 4y agoi doubt they'll start charging in two years. they're just avoiding making the promise of "free forever" if it turns out nobody cares about this feature and they decide to drop it from future iPhones. in two years, it'll either continue to be free, or it will be discontinued (or transitioned to an "if you want it, go pay money to globalstar" model)
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago> And even worse: Imagine you could pay later but you don't use that option because you want to save money oO If someone makes this choice in a legitimate emergency, I would refer to it as a shot of chlorine in the gene pool.