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Comment by shadowpho | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is a game changer for many users. Plus it will generate cash once the 2 years run out!

This raises BOM costs and has significant operating costs. How many users are likely to continue to pay for this service once the two years are up?

It's a great feature but it's far from a guaranteed money maker. This could just as likely disappear from future iPhone models.

edit: also competing dedicated devices also include the cost of SAR insurance in their monthly fees, which are significant: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461/pn/010-06000-SU

It starts at $15 a month but any serious user is paying more like $35-65 a month.

I live in a small city in what is rural America. There are a lot of places that I travel that I don't get cell service in. This could literally be a life-saver for me.

While I don't know how large this group is, skiers, hikers, boaters, campers, off-roaders would all likely get use out of this functionality.

Most people in the groups you mention probably already own a dedicated emergency locator device. AAPL may very well take a lot of their business, but maybe not. An inReach is going to survive a much bigger fall than an iPhone.

Who are AAPL?

It's Apple's stock symbol. People sometimes refer to companies by their stock symbols (on this site and others), though usually more in a financial discussion context.

Gotta save that 1 character yet require hitting shift to cancel it out.

JUST LEAVE CAPS LOCK ON ALL THE TIME, EASY

Apple

> Most people in the groups you mention probably already own a dedicated emergency locator device

Hahahahahahaha! Not a chance. Maybe the over landing crowd, and hardcore hikers, but most casual enjoyers of the outdoors definitely do NOT have a Spot or InReach. Next time you’re on a ski hill, ask around - you’ll be shocked how few people have them.

iPhone has shown that people don't want dedicated devices. iPhone has replaced: watch, compass, digital camera, calculator, ebook reader, portable DVD player, flashlight, Garmin GPS, etc. etc. etc.

debatable...lots of people with iphones still use watches and ereaders.

and for a life saving device like this i know a subset of people will not want it a part of their phone.

...but this will definitely take a LOT of business from garmin because i believe that subset to be pretty small.

As someone who hikes (well, it's NZ, so, tramps) a fair bit, we'll continue taking our PLB with us (we opted for a 406MHz PLB rather than the Garmin solutions because we didn't want to find out in a life-threatening situation that our credit cards had expired a month ago and we couldn't call for help!). You're right, a dedicated device is pretty mandatory for true life threatening situations, and we always have a bevy of safety equipment on harder tramps.

With that said, the iPhone (Pro?) is becoming somewhat of a swiss army knife for casual tramping: offline maps with GPS and a compass, an excellent set of cameras, an ereader, excellent battery life to back all that up _and_ it can now communicate with the rest of the world in non-life threatening -- but marginal -- situations. As an example, we leave intentions with people whenever we leave ("here is our route, if we're not back by midday on the third, contact SAR"); being able to message people and say "hey, I've rolled my ankle, we're safe but will be late because we're limping out, don't worry" is a pretty excellent feature.

We're probably a niche market, but several friends in that community are pretty excited about this feature. For 2-3 day trips, this makes the outdoors much more accessible.

Sure. Garmin is still $5B in sales annually. Which is peanuts next to the iPhone, so you wonder why they even bother going after it. AirPods are a bigger business than that.

It’s almost like they’re thinking about more than just the immediate money and consider these part of their messaging around health & safety.

Kind of like how Collision Detection could have been an excellent Apple Watch upsell feature but was brought to all iPhones anyway.

They recognize the power of things like fall and afib detection for pushing into the ever growing consumer Health market.

The biggest issue is probably battery life though... an InReach lasts 4 days in its default mode and 30 days in a lower-power mode. An iPhone lasts... less than that.

Most people would much rather spend $20-$50 on decent external batteries and keep their all-in-one device than spend hundreds of dollars + monthly fees for dedicated satellite communicators or rescue beacons.

The more serious of that crowd likely will, but not the more casual people. I'd say I see them hanging from a few percent of packs--but the deeper into the backcountry one goes the higher the percentage becomes.

How large is the demand for something like this? Are tons of people really going that far out of range of cell signals?

A lot of serious hikers use dedicated devices for this kind of functionality. It's expensive-ish, and the chance of needing it is small. But if you do need it then it could be an actual life-or-death situation, so it's worth it if you're out in the middle of nowhere regularly.

For the first 10 months in 2020, the Adirondacks had 245 search and rescue events[1] and it's a fairly small park nationally. This could save a huge amount of park service resources if they could be given the GPS cords to go directly to rather then spend hours searching. Expand that nation wide, it's a huge public win, and a great safety benefit to the individuals to be able to get help as soon as possible if something happens.

I was unable to find nation wide stats on search and rescue events.

[1] https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/record-number-of-...

How large is the demand for something like this? Are tons of people really going that far out of range of cell signals?

When I lived in the desert, the local newspaper regularly published stories about tourists getting lost/stuck/stranded and then dying.

Going by the newspaper accounts, I'd estimate at least a dozen people died in the desert each year, and that was just in my area.

The demand is enough that the govn't could pay Apple the whole cost of this program and save money on search and rescue just because "head to the location of the phone" is a lot easier than "carefully comb this entire mountain range".

And that's not even counting the lives saved.

I've never tried to total them up but I don't find that at all surprising. Tourists head out into the wilderness with no respect for what they're facing. They aren't carrying enough water, they have a breakdown, they're in deep trouble.

Here in Las Vegas we have a ring of mountains around the city--and virtually no cell coverage beyond that ring. Even within the ring the outlying areas are often shadowed out.

US national parks alone had 297 million visitors last year, and it's not hard to find areas without coverage in many of them. Many state parks also have tens of millions of visitors each year.

I have never not lost cell coverage when going on a hike in the mountains, and I only go on casual day hikes.

Honestly, yes. I'm from Kentucky, and if I go back home, there's very little cell coverage. Too mountainous, too few people. You can usually get signal if you climb the biggest hill, or go into town, but if you've injured yourself and need to call 911, those aren't ideal requirements.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of midwest areas that have a similar problem.

I agree this is a good feature, however it's 2022 and maybe the government should start forcing companies like Verizon to take some of the $50 billion in profits they make per year and build cell towers in remote areas even if it means they won't make a 1,000% profit from doing so?

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