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Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

A few years from now Apple will invent satellite messaging and we'll all fall in love with it.

Don't they already use it for emergency purposes on the Iphone 14 and 15? For free on the new phones but I think it is getting subscription based soon.

Yes https://support.apple.com/en-nz/105097

I believe Apple literally holds the patent on this. It's in use.

I'm not sure what the patent would be on considering satphones with texting have existed long before iphones with satellite SOS showed up.

Are you referring to US patent number 20220312182 or what?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220312182A1/en?oq=2022...

As usual, some generic manufacturer copies some iPhone feature and people say this stuff. Pretty amusing.

And as usual, some people believe Apple was the first to invent some feature, while it’s really been around for many years.

Iridium has offered a global satellite phone service since 1998, and the first satellite-capable “regular” mobile phones without a huge external antenna started showing up in the early 2010s (Thuraya in EMEA and Asia, Terrestar in the US).

Satellite mobile telephony is only literally rocket science these days.

Ok, but having these emergency features on a regular phone, with free service (I think for two years when you buy a phone) is a game changer.

I'm not denying that it's a very cool and useful feature!

But it is, in the end, an almost prototypical Apple feature: Making something that's been technically possible, but mostly a niche feature, mass-market accessible.

Again, very cool and I love having it on my phone, but I just wouldn't call it an Apple invention.

I wouldn’t call it an iridium invention either. The military has been using satellites to send messages before Iridium.

Definitely, but Iridium was the first constellation offering 100% global coverage using inter-satellite links, and as far as I know they also pioneered the "bulky cell phone" form factor (as opposed to briefcase- or backpack-sized terminals).

Yeah, some incremental improvements on existing technology for sure. Definitely worth that credit.

It was an absolute marvel of technology for its time, in my view.

I think they really were the first to do in-space inter-satellite routing. If you call one Iridium phone from another, the call will never touch any earth-side infrastructure (after call setup). And they've been the only ones doing that until Starlink recently launched inter-satellite links.

All of that in 1998, when everybody else was still doing "bent-pipe" style satellite communications, and putting things into space was still prohibitively expensive!

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