My only thinking is that they may be planning to make the satellite network available to none emergency messaging too, and that’s what’s covered in this filing.
Let friends know how remote you go.
If you’re on an adventure without cell service,
you can now use Find My to share your location
via satellite so friends and family know where you are.Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.
Make of that what you want
s/freezer/bottom of a locked filing cabinet/https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...
You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.
Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).
That's 1.412538 watts versus 0.003162 watts... hence why you can just leave it in your pack.
What the hell is that all about?
If this has changed, scratch all of the above.
Because there are way too many spouses who go to as absurd lengths as setting private investigators on their partners. Stalking is just as much a concern inside families as it is for everyday persons - I might be tempted to say that the impact is worse given the potential for domestic violence. Or just imagine fundamentalist parents tracking their children to Planned Parenthood, a known LGBT-friendly place or whatever.
Ideally, there would be laws and regulations on trackers - and not just hardware-ones like the AirTags, but also software-based ones - that mandate features to prevent abuse, but sadly politicians haven't caught up on tech developments yet.
Coercion, simple as that.
If A had to coerce B to turn of the alert, then the alert would have already served its purpose to tell B that they're being tracked by A. Moreover, there should still be some interface which B can use to figure out which AirTag is following them, so person B would 1) know that A is tracking them in general, and 2) have the ability to check whether A is tracking them in the moment.
Please explain what additional information or utility the continued notification is giving person B in this moment, or if my understanding of the hypothetical is wrong.
I want to track the dog, the shared cars’ keys. I want to track a shared bike. There are a load of items I’d put them on, but they aren’t just mine.
I don’t believe it’s a security thing. It’s the Apple way to get software to a point then just stop development, there are plenty of examples.
So I doubt this will be used much as a stalker feature. Unless of course they hide a phone on your person/vehicle in such a way that it is both totally unnoticeable to you AND maintains a very clear view of the sky. Apple said that sending messages could take a minute or more with even light foliage, so hiding it in/under a car will be a total no-go.
And all that to protect your love ones, of course.
People apparently forgot all about PRISM already. That didn't take long.
The contentious element is the "within the bounds of the law" bit. In the US and Europe that means a lot, because Apple can use the courts to block government overreach and they have done so. In China they can't do that, so they don't just as nobody else operating within China can.
Google does deserve credit for refusing to operate their search services within China, while Apple and many other companies decided they were willing to do business there on Chinese government terms.
Because 3 letters agencies never, ever had backdoors in popular systems. It's not like the US had an illegal massive secret cabale dedicated to mass spying on its own population after all.
Luckily, Apple plateforms are notoriously open so it will be easy to check. It's great that we don't have to take their word for it after they lied about not being part of any PRISM-like program.
Anyways, all that doesn't matter much. Why would it be a problem when the economy, climate, international politics and the democracy are so stable these days? I can't see any reason why history would repeat and powerful entities would abuse any power they get.
Somebody who thinks like that would be a crazy tin hat conspirationist, and not at all a concerned citizen.
No, only the part of the population ready to spend hundred of dollars on an upgrade to get copy/paste must be capable of rational thinking. Anybody else is biased.
There is also no source code or even audit by 3rd parties (that are not US government related)
If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.
We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.
That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.
Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.
Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.
Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.
>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.
Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.
And for your own privacy!
There is an optional feature where you can choose to share your current location using a satellite even if you don’t have coverage.
It would be stupid to use this capacity to track users because the data is not worth more than what you can get for free if you just cache the location and wait for the user to move into cellular coverage again. There is no conspiracy here.
You can't even realistically point the InReach Mini at a satellite because it doesn't tell you where they are. At any time there's only a couple of iridium sats in view and they move quite fast across the sky.
But the device has an antenna with the right amount of upwards gain and the right polarisation to deal with that. For an iphone it's a lot harder to incorporate that.
Couple that with phones that will roam into satellite coverage in rural areas... there will be extensive bandwidth requirements from this newly deployed fleet. Especially in the summer...
That's not what Apple announced. Satellite service is only for emergencies and is cumbersome to use.
Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites to send incredibly small amounts of data measured in bytes, not kilobytes. These satellites have only limited bandwidth, and it's very expensive. And with the antenna size and power available in a phone today, it's never going to be more than kilobytes.
SpaceX Starlink/TMobile announced a much higher-bandwidth option, but it's incredibly fleeting, lasting just a few seconds.
Starlink satellites are in very low Earth orbit, moving at 8km/second. You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions. Starlink currently builds a very cheap phased-array antenna, but it's still ~$1,000 to manufacture, it's a couple cubic feet in volume, and it uses >100 watts.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but no one knows how to build a satellite system currently that will cause any carriers to shit their pants.
I haven't read the announcement, but Globalstar's constellation is in LEO.
what most people think of as a satellite phone is indeed LEO since iridium has the lion's share of the market.
It sounded like temporary connectivity was only initially; once they have a full shell of V2 satellites I would expect constant connectivity.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
Google’s Lyra codec can already get down to 3Kb/s and be reasonably audible. It’s not a stretch to imagine within a few years we’ll be able to push that to below 1Kb/s.
Taking those two things together, I think it’s fairly reasonable to assume at least text and voice are within reach.
> The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style. Ølvira [the ship] was matching old video with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
> [...]
> The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred […] The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
globalstar's existing network and licenses have nothing to do with geostationary at all.
please don't comment on things like this if you have fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of different types of mutually incompatible satellite network technology.
People already do this when communicating from the ground via amateur satellites on handheld radios. Here the fellow followed the sweep of the sky with his yagi.
(Disclaimer: casual observer at best. May be misrepresenting what I’ve heard.)
This makes me think it's less of an affordability issue, and more of where they fall along spectrum on amount of margin that can be squeezed from smaller suppliers.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
I'd also bet on Starlink to scale better than Globalstar (after they also own the fucking rockets). Add better features and innovate
I'm surprised it's worth doing this, I'd have expected that most findmy situations it's enough to get the pile of data hours or days later when somebody has Internet access again. Like, suppose I drop my airpods out of a pocket on some mountain trail on Saturday morning, a subsequent walker's iPhone sees them, but has no WiFi of course, however on Monday they're in the office, their iPhone reports it saw my airpods, X here at T time, and that's enough that I should be able (if I want) to go back and find them.
The place you might spend longer periods with only satellite is the open ocean, but basically if you lose shit in the ocean it's fucking gone.
The use case isn’t AirPods lost in the tundra it’s your husband or wife lost in the tundra.
Today was a real shot at two of Garmin’s profit centres with the Apple Watch Pro also targeting their GPS sports watches.
Moving forward, having both will be great, but I think having to rely only on an iPhone would make me a bit nervous, so I’m not sure how much of a threat this is for the inReach devices (at least for now).
I always carry my InReach with periodic location sharing enabled when I'm on backpacking trips. I also almost always carry it during international travel and road trips, but not usually with periodic location sharing. If iPhones start offering plans with periodic location sharing, I'm fairly confident that I'd stop carrying the InReach unless I was on a particularly remote trip that was outside of my comfort zone (which isn't something I really do anyway).
Some of these effects are already seen with cell phones. OTOH while no panacea, cell phones can help when someone is in genuine danger.
Genies and bottles and all that. Of course authorities may get more liberal with levying significant fines for people who get rescued because they were unprepared.
Now someone that is in a wreck or sees one can stay put and contact emergency services with a way more accurate location, and I think that's awesome.
But I get what you’re saying, if you have 2 you have 1 and if you have 1 you have none. Some redundancy so nice and the iPhone as a backup to the inreach will be a likely set up.
It may have been my device (older Qualcomm branded phone), but my experience seems consistent with what others report.
On the contrary, I've been very happy with the Zoleo device and service. It's been 100% reliable in all conditions even in the middle of the bush.
Communication is one-way only and there is no way to verify delivery.
I agree that this will cut into InReach sales, because it provides about 70% of the capability and it's built into your phone. That said, the two way full text messaging and confirmation of delivery are huge advantages, especially if you actually plan to use it as opposed to it being a "just in case" communication device.
It's clearly two-way.
I am not a backpacker, so maybe I am missing something but if it is JUST for emergencies what do the Paid services offer than a NOAA Registered PLB Device would not?
If you need the other features then that makes a different argument but the original statement was that iPhone feature would kill these over devices because iPhone could be used to send emergency messages.
As for other things worth paying for: being able to text your family back home and let them know you're running a day late but everything's ok so not to report you as missing goes a long way to helping everyone involved have some peace of mind.
Coordinating pickups and getting weather updates are also big value-adds.
It will definitely be two-way.
I'm currently wearing a Garmin Fenix 7, which recently replaced a Forerunner 645. I look forward to seeing the Ultra reviews, but it doesn't strike me as competitive yet. E.g., the 36 hours of battery life is surely exciting for Apple Watch fans, but my Fenix 7 gets 18 days of battery life. Or if I turn Battery Saver on, I get 57 days of usage vs 2.5 days for the Apple Watch Ultra.
And what really makes the Garmin stuff suited for sports is years and years of carefully designed specialist features. I'm not even much of an athlete but I really appreciate so much of what they offer.
If the price were better I could see it being a threat for Garmin's low-end models. But at $800? Even if I were an Apple fan I'd struggle at paying more money for less watch.
So I ended up getting the regular model, figuring if I ever needed solar anything, I'd come back and get the right panel for the trip. Yet another reason I'm happy to support my local REI store.
Compared to Starlink's 2400 currently operational satellites that does seem low. Even compared to Iridium's 75 from the late 2010s, Globalstar's 24 seems small.
With the current satellites, yes, if they think they have enough capital (at least many hundreds of millions) to launch a new clean sheet of paper design LEO network using the existing globalstar L/S-band spectrum licenses, they could implement something better.
The value of globalstar is not in the existing satellites and earth stations, which are pretty much trash at this point for any modern use except very low data rate M2M data in certain geographically restricted areas. The value is in the existing LEO network operational licenses.
I wouldn't be surprised if the current Globalstar network is so limited it wouldn't even do voice.
From Wikipedia:
>In 2007, Globalstar launched eight additional first-generation spare satellites into space to help compensate for the premature failure of their in-orbit satellites. Between 2010 and 2013, Globalstar launched 24 second-generation satellites in an effort to restore their system to full service.
So you're totally right.
Unlike Globalstar, the Iridium network uses polar orbits which means they're covering a larger area and thus need more satellites to achieve comparable service in the limited latitudes that Globalstar covers.
(that being said, if you're going to be in mountainous terrain, higher latitudes, far from land, etc then Iridium will have better coverage)
One of the incentives to participate may be free or reduced-cost satellite data.
A single cell tower with 5G/4G is not far off doing that, per sector. And these cell towers can cover as little as 500m or less in dense urban areas. The problem is there are very real physics you come up against with this. We are really tapping out efficiency gains these days so the only option is more, higher frequency spectrum and much denser cell networks.
Assuming you mean LTE when you say 4G, the per sector bandwidth is customarily an order of magnitude less than 20gbps. Even in the case of 5G, with sub-6Ghz anyway, you rarely will see above 15gbps. There’s only so many bits per second you can squeeze per megahertz and below 6Ghz the allocations there just isn’t enough available frequency. That’s why cell towers have gotten much closer together.
And towers are getting closer together. You reduce transmit/receive power and place the towers closer, which results in similar coverage but less interference between cells (with reduced power output).
When you mentioned 4G in the same statement. The highest I’ve ever seen for a LTE tower in the US (I’ve been in 49 states and checked via field test equipment in multiple areas of each state, yes, I’m that nerd) was under 5gbps. LTE sectors more commonly are in the 1-2gbps range. As to 5G, sub 6Ghz it’s possible to get close to 20gbps air rate, but you need an very wide channel to do so (have to do the math, but I think >100mhz of spectrum) and I’m not aware of any US carriers doing so (but they could be). If we are talking the rare unicorn mmWave, the one with less than 1% of all US cell towers supporting, sure, 20gbps is common. Twice that isn’t unheard of either.
Long story short, we are violently agreeing both before and now. It’s just nuances we are both dinging the other for. Cheers!
No, I’m really not, that’s why I put the caveat about maybe not today, but big rivers have a way of starting as a small trickle.
We already see this kind of thing already with T-Mobile + Starlink, Home internet providers bundling phone plans and allowing you to roam to other networks, traditional cellphone providers hopping on board Wi-Fi calling support, and Apple + Globalstar.
I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
> I quite like the idea of aiming it by hand using software as the guide.
In the event of an emergency, fumbling with my phone to find service sounds like a nightmare.
Also, difficult-to-use is better than zero connectivity, which is the current situation.
There is an argument that pay for rescue causes people to hesitate to call and that can lead to worse outcomes and/or more dangerous rescue scenarios.
And for a dedicated device, the tracking feature is laughably bad with worse accuracy than my friend's watch.
Better than nothing in case of emergency but the reliability leaves a lot to be desired.
There are lots of great places to land, but being stuck in the desert without any way to communicate is a very real possibility (Ironically, even at many small town airports I’ve landed at).
That said, aircraft have ELTs which are supposed to trigger on impact and can be manually activated as well, so an InReach probably wouldn't make a life-or-death difference very often.
Similarly, the best emergency-alert system is the one you have with you. Apple is playing the long game, getting their feet wet in a new area, and providing some value. They will iterate, it's what they do.
[1] For some definition of "no-one". Obviously some people do carry around SLR's but it's a tiny minority.
It doesn't have to be perfect, compared to the current alternative of 1) Having nothing to fumble around or 2) Be one of the few people with a full on expensive satellite phone I think it's a valuable addition.
Similar to how Chase Jarvis said "the best camera is the one you always have with you", this is also the case for emergency equipment.
They tried getting helicopter evacuation but even that took hours he didn’t have.
Apple's antenna can only be smaller if it's lower gain. I would bet they're making that tradeoff because they don't need as much bandwidth. (Emergency pings could be measured in dozens of bytes, let alone kilobytes or megabytes.)
> antennas with large effective apertures are considered high-gain antennas (or beam antennas), which have relatively small angular beam widths.
You CAN get high gain antennas for things like your WiFi router, it's my goto when an elderly relative complains about their wifi range.
You can't actually increase power with an (inactive) antenna but you CAN change it's radiation pattern. The higher gain omnidirectional antennas just take a radiation pattern that looks like a sphere (0dB gain) and squashes it into a donut shape. So you get more range laterally around the antenna at the expense of less above and below it
For emergencies, having to point at the sky isn't a big deal.
There’s been a lot of research into emergency UX. Basically, it needs to be dead simple or people die. In an emergency, people are usually panicked, injured or in shock. The tool needs to do its thing simply and effortlessly to cut through the panic and confusion of a real emergency. I have an avalanche transponder that is one big button because when you friend just got buried under 20 tons of snow and rocks, you have the leftover brain for one button.
From the demo, I think Apple is very aware of this which is why they give you a series of canned prompts. They’ve probably already used up a significant cognitive load by having you point the phone for signal that having you type as well was considered dangerous.
Your definition of the word “fine” is apparently rather generous. Be in an actual emergency situation and the InReach is down right frustrating as hell, but “better than nothing”. I don’t have optimism for Apple’s offering either for the record.
I've been using PLB for years and unless I'll only switch to Garmin InReach if I really need to communicate with people back home. Yes, it can be very handy, not just for that, but also to communicate with other fellow thruhikers in ways other than trail registers, but in some cases LEO might not be good enough for sending distress signal.
While it might have been possible for me to retrieve it (I spent a day searching it) if it were a tracker device (such as InReach), I found that even if you find a Garmin device, Garmin support won't disclose any details about its owner or contact them on your behalf. I'm not sure if for privacy or commercial reasons but I just found it awkward (I didn't find a device myself, but learned about it through Garmin support forums).
If I were to buy a new PLB today, I would have considered the newer models with Return Link Service (such as ResQLink 410 RLS). It doesn't let you communicate, but notifies you that your distress signal has been delivered to.
Just read the other comment. While I guess hours response is an outlier in clear sky conditions, I really wish that Garmin would have made stats publicly available
Because I already owned the InReach (I also used it as a backup for business travel in "less than safe" areas) I never really looked at PLBs. I will look at the ACR range. The prices look pretty OK considering the InReach has a fairly high monthly cost and these don't.
Best to get a HAM license to be safe (it’s trivially easy to pass the General exam), but if you are only using it in an actual emergency, I highly doubt anyone will judge you too harshly for not having it.
It definitely is an outlier, maybe partially due to conditions (I wasn’t there, just was someone who received the other party’s messages way late), but that’s the point. An emergency situation is already an outlier as is, the last thing I want is to trust a device which has a definite probability of failure again. Screw “me” over once, shame on you. Twice? Shame on me.
Tell that to a someone I know who had a broken leg and not only was the location way off, it took multiple hours to send. He was around a half mile of a well trodden hiking path too, so help took no time to get there once the message was actually broadcast (while the location was way off, he was visible from that wrong location). He wishes he’d had a loud whistle instead.
> I'll take InReach any day.
I’ll take my Inmarsat based phone any day. Sure, the monthly fee is 1.5x higher, but I know my message AND my call will go through as long as I have a clear view of the sky.
I had a GEO satphone myself (Thuraya which is really cheap for airtime in Europe) before but as I hike through the mountains it's very hard to get a line of sight. So I didn't deem it useful enough for emergency.
Maybe I'll get a PLB too then, I'll think about it.
Yeah, the iSatPhone2 is fairly forgiving on line of sight as long as you aren’t in a canyon or hiking up the north face of a mountain. Given they are in geosynchronous orbit, targeting is much easier (just point antenna south). My iridium I had back in the late 00’s was a PITA to get signal on a hike where we had to call for an air ambulance for emergency evac.
So it was a bit tricky to reach the sat especially in hilly or built up areas.
Unfortunately GlobalStar is probably one of the worst satellite constellations out there (that I know of at least) for actual communication (SPOT devices used or still use GlobalStar and are famously crap compared to Garmin inReach on Iridium). Of course it could be improved and they do have the bandwith licenses which is important.
Do I have to be the angry parent with the shotgun or are Apple going to make an honest woman out of Globalstar and just buy them. There is probably enough down the back of the sofa at cuppertino to cover it.
While we are at it someone might want to check Apple employee stock portfolios ... that is a strong 80% straight line rally in a bear market the last few months after they announced their profit margins were -72% in June
This way they pay a relatively minute fee and can have a guarantee they can use Globalstar's existence to compete with others on with price. So they not only don't spend 3.71B they won't get back, the cost of those messages is relatively nothing and easy to compete on with others - for what is a commoditised service. They'd also force Globalstar to spend all that cash theyd get from Apple on their capex, at no risk to Apple.
Almost a similar reason to outsource to Foxconn vs buy them and have it in house.
I do disagree however, that global satellite coverage is a commoditised service just yet.
So the way to make an “honest woman” is to force somebody “to marry her at gunpoint” you say? The previous century called and would like their antiquated statements back. I’m sure you didn’t mean to be sexist, just pointing out the obvious about how bad that phrase is these days.