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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

TBF that’s what Apple did, basically.

It wasn’t in the initial release. Needed a software update 2 months later or so.

You were only supposed to get 1 year (?) of service. But they extended that by a year.

Because of that everyone with a qualifying phone is still in the “free” stage so we still don’t know what it will cost. Or when that will start.

If ever.

I’ve never used it but I like that my iPhone has it. I would never carry a Garmin (city/suburb life, no point) but I know the satellite is there if needed.

I think Apple is expanding it to iMessage this year (text only) though for all we know that will cost extra.

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It's doubtful they'll ever charge for SOS. The "one year, one more year" thing is likely to make the accounting and liability work out. If they had just said "free for the life of the phone" it would have locked them into providing the service for many years, and required revenue deferral for many years. Easier to just under-promise.

That’s kind of what I expect. It will simply be free forever but maybe the other services that they might add in the future, such as iMessage over satellite, will cost extra.

“A man got lost in the woods and died because he didn’t pay Apple two dollars a month“ is probably not a headline they want to see.

It’s also possible they didn’t know how often it would end up getting used and so they said that is a hedge in case it ended up too expensive on their end. Now that they know it’s not they don’t really worry about it.

I mean they they don't have to choose between "100% free forever" and "not free and literally kill the people who didn't pay in advance."

They could just leave it enabled for everyone, and then retroactively charge them for a (moderately hefty) 1 year subscription if they end up using it.

Charging a fee for using it is a bad idea because then people will delay using it until it's too late.

That's why in New Zealand, at least, there is no fee for a rescue callouts in general.

> You were only supposed to get 1 year (?) of service. But they extended that by a year.

I suspect they wanted to gauge what the usage (and therefore cost to them) would be like before making any promises.

I would not be surprised if satellite messaging ends up costing after the first year, but that satellite SOS remains free forever. After all, who wants the reputation hit when someone ends up dying in the wilderness because they didn't keep up their satellite payments?

They can charge you after you get rescued. Or does that come out as a negligible amount?

Even if you managed to charge people (or their SAR insurances) tens of thousands of dollars per rescue, I'm not sure that would entirely pay for running such a service.

But I suspect their actual business model will be to charge for non-emergency messaging, which might just be able to subsidize the emergency use case.

Are there cases of people actually being charged for their backcountry rescues? I know it's theoretically allowed many places but I'm not aware of anyone actually being billed.

Generally, SAR teams would rather the R continue to stand for Rescue rather than Recovery (of a body).

As soon as SAR involves a helicopter, I remember hearing you're looking at a hefty bill in many places, even if the SAR teams themselves don't charge anything. (Not sure why/how that is the case – maybe the helicopter is often operated by a for-profit company, essentially taking the SAR crew as passenger?)

Yeah, I'd imagine the helicopter is where the big expense lies and those are mostly private hires. The SAR teams around me are first responders already on duty or volunteers. They still have expenses when launching a mission but driving a dozen people to a trailhead is cheaper than a chopper.

As someone who’s been rescued via helicopter, I can state at least in my case there wasn’t a large bill. The only thing I was charged for was the out of network ER visit.

In Alberta and BC, helicopter rescue is free if you contact emergency services (Parks or RCMP).

New Hampshire regularly charges for backcountry rescues when they determine the person being rescued was negligent: https://www.backpacker.com/stories/essays/opinion/new-hampsh...

Outside of the US all bets are off. Plenty of rescue services that charge.

They could.

But “iPhone saves man’s life after he fell down a mountain” sounds a whole lot better than “worlds richest company charges man who nearly died $25 to save his life”.

I just used iMessage via satellite on the iOS public beta this past weekend. I forgot it even existed. The phone prompted me to update my location for "Find My" via Satellite, which I've done before. So I accepted, and got a screen that gave me the option of sending iMessage via satellite to. Sent one to a friend as a test. It's a pretty cool UI. It shows "Satellite" as the message type when writing messages, as you might see "SMS" or "iMessage" or "RCS". And then when you're in iMessage and connected, the dynamic island shows a green indicator. When not connected, the dynamic island is larger and shows you which way to turn to reconnect to satellite; presumably if you want to see if there are replies to your message, or whatever.

Thanks for the review. I have a Garmin inReach device that I connect to my phone when I go up in the mountains, but I would love to get rid of it. Sorry Garmin.

When you're in SOS mode, you can use the satellite connection to manually update your location—separate of the emergency response service—so anyone who you've chosen to share that with can see it, as well as in Find My. I'm often out of cell service in the mountains and will usually push the location once I'm in the general area I plan to be for a while.

Oh that’s right. That’s the other thing you can do. I’d forgotten that.

Thanks.

While I never needed the satellite SOS it’s fun that there is a demo in settings that shows you how to find the satellite and everything just as if you used the feature for real.

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