It's possible he jumped the gun in 2019 and it's finally coming to fruition. It is cool, and Starlink shows it's possible, but it may also just be wishcasting.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/12/20/apple-secret-team-satel...
I wouldn’t say it shows it’s possible yet. They claim it’s possible but there are none of the starlink v2 satellites in orbit that are required for it to work. Originally v2 satellites required Starship for launching, it sounds like they are pivoting to Flacon now though due to delays in Starship reaching orbit.
Apple will want the service to be available as soon as the Phone launches, so potentially in late September. It’s going to be at least late 2023 before the SpaceX/T-Mobile service lunches.
Getting the v2 satellites up is an unmet milestone, not proof that it won't work.
Clouds, rain, atmospheric density variations, interfering signals and noise sources, phone positioning, the attenuation and reflections from nearby materials...
Also, don't forget that the SpaceX announcement was for a max of about 4 Mbps for an entire cell which they said was a very large geographic area. It will also be asynchronous short message (text) for quite a while. Next time I am backpacking in Canyonlands it will be great to have, but it will have very little impact on the vast majority of phone usage for quite some time. Its a small but important step.
That is the intent of Starlink. Some amount of connectivity everywhere. For all the corners of the world that no traditional carrier will cover.
With a complex, large, high gain antenna.
Satellite phones you can buy right now don’t look like iPhones, for a reason.
Both support handheld, battery-powered client devices (some even smaller than smartphones), and the former has been using inter-satellite links since day one.