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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

It's an unfortunate fact of human nature that once you get used to something existing you expect it to exist*. Something one could easily forget to pay (say you overspent and denied the charge) could end up killing you.

I sincerely hope in two years the SOS feature is free and a limited data plan for $$$ exists. This could also explain the 85% of sat service usage. But we shouldn't have to hope such a thing exists...

* We can hate people all we want for this "feature" but the fact of the matter its how we're built.

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I think a person who is going out into the wilderness, who has prepared food and water and a tent and told their family where they are going, is probably going to remember to renew the subscription. Apple might even let you do it via satellite.

"Wanna survive? 200/yr"

I mean, yeah, that’s the model that Garmin, Spot (which is under the same network that Apple is now on), and others are already using. It’s essentially insurance.

It's worth noting that you can use a PLB (which runs on the COSPAS-SARSAT network) to summon help for free. No subscription required. On the other hand, the devices themselves cost $300 and aren't usable for anything else outside a life-or-death emergency.

The big reason InReach/Spot subscription devices are so popular is that they include non-emergency messaging to family as part of the service.

I wasn't even thinking about those folks actually, more referring to all the hikers who get lost during a day trip.

This feature is not targeted towards day trip hikers, whose low level of preparedness in other areas along with lack of experience means they probably won’t venture further than where they would be found by other hikers.

Who cares whose it's actually targeted at.

Some of them will get lost and some of them will have this smart watch.

And some of those may have an expired feature which could save their life.

The world is a dangerous place, especially for careless people.

It's easy to lose the trail in some terrain and the people you're talking about likely wouldn't know what to do about it. Just last week I saved one of those guys from at best a rather unpleasant experience, at worst being stranded in the wilderness--and he didn't even lose the trail.

We had met on a local summit although we had approached it via different routes. We were on a spur off a longer trail--and he took the wrong direction when coming back to the main trail. I encountered him probably an hour later and realized his mistake and got him headed back to his car. Had he continued there was one junction ahead--if he took the left branch he would end up where I was parked which was miles from his car. If he took the right branch he would have failed to end up at a slightly more distant parking lot as by the trail it was about 16 miles away, going over a summit just below 12k' (we were a bit above 9k' at the time) in the process. His phone battery was dead, it was near the new moon and that route goes near cliffs.

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