Because cellular will never be ubiquitous and in areas with max cell coverage that are still plenty of nature areas without a signal. I live in a big college to

Because cellular will never be ubiquitous and in areas with max cell coverage that are still plenty of nature areas without a signal. I live in a big college town but often go for walk in a canyon area 10 minutes from my home with zero coverage of any provider. I will feel a little safer having Sat capabilities. Can someone just buy satellite coverage? Doesn't the equipment need to be specially engineered for the specific sat frequencies and protocols? Apple launched exclusively on AT&T because they were willing to not force Apple to provide user and device data to them for marketing purposes. Other provides jumped on the bandwagon when they saw how much money they were missing which soothed their poor marketing folks who didn't get the data they wanted. Can I speculate that Musk perhaps offered the same choice - use us but we want customer data? Perhaps he wasn't willing to dedicate the large amount of capacity which Apple seems to be capturing. Perhaps Apple didn't want Samsung to share capacity with Apple when Samsung inevitably copies this feature in the next version of their phones? In any even it's not just satellite capacity. If you recall from the presentation Apple has also put in a large human component as the interface between the automated messages and the dispatching of emergency services. So it's a big deal all around.