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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

You have to look at the business side of things, too. Apple has to pay a lot of money to whoever is managing and maintaining the satellites behind this and if you only ever pay when you need it you might not never pay at all. The correct mindset to have about this is that it's like insurance — you can't pick up insurance only after the fact when you need it, otherwise all insurance providers would be broke.

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It’s a bit different from insurance, in that the benefit to the user of contacting police/rescue could be nearly infinite, while the marginal cost to Apple is small. So as long as the after-the-fact charge is high enough, Apple can amortize their costs. The main issue is it’s terrible PR for Apple to be sending $1000 bills to people who’ve been mauled by bears or gotten lost in the mountains, many of whom wouldn’t be able to pay anyway.

> The main issue is it’s terrible PR for Apple to be sending $1000 bills to people who’ve been mauled by bears or gotten lost in the mountains, many of whom wouldn’t be able to pay anyway.

Just hook it up to Apple Pay.

“Pay $1000 to make an emergency call”

Hard to authorize payment with Face ID when your face has been eaten by a bear.

Launch 2025: BearID

Yet people still think FaceId is a good authenticating tool.

> The main issue is it’s terrible PR for Apple to be sending $1000 bills to people who’ve been mauled by bears or gotten lost in the mountains

Is it any better PR if there are stories out there of bodies found starved to death in the wilderness equipped with an iPhone that has the hardware capabilities to contact emergency services, but couldn't because the person didn't pay Apple life insurance

Not just the satellites, but they also said that, due to the slow speeds involved in the satellites, Apple will employ people who will be able to step in the middle of you and EMS, to help get information to them faster and answer relevant questions, without having to rely on you receiving/answering them using your device. The cost of this team alone will be huge.

This is probably an expansion of the same Globalstar team that services SOS messages from their own SPOT satellite messengers, which also use the same satellite network.

The SPOT plans and the competing Garmin inReach plans are not cheap:

https://www.findmespot.com/en-us/products-services/service-p...

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/837461

And if you make a SPOT call nobody may be out there for a while. I looked into getting one just in case. Where I like to camp, in BLM land, SPOT calls the "local" 911 responder which is 2.5 hours away and run by CHP. Back then they said it can take up to 72 hours for someone to get a team together to look for you. The owners of the backpacking store I went to, whom I know, said it wouldn't be worth my money.

I imagine there's better coverage in a national park though.

Even in a national park, it will take time to respond to a satellite call.

Contrary to popular belief, search and rescue doesn't always send a helicopter. It's still common to send a ranger on foot and help walk somebody out on the trail. Or if that's not possible, to take a team of humans and carry someone out on a litter.

More generally... From what I was trained, ~12 hours is considered a fast rescue. The average time (according to the FAA's pilot survival training) is 31 hours, even with a known good location fix. 72 hours is very possible if there's inclement weather or difficulty locating someone.

It seems like this is a big advantage of the inreach in that you can text with EMS to convey if it is an urgent situation. You can also text friends/family to make alternate arrangements if the regular rescue people aren’t going to be fast enough.

Sounds like the Apple version lets you send some info also. And I would generally expect search and rescue to be able to get to you faster than friends.

That's true, it apparently has some multiple choice questions you can answer, which is definitely better than just hitting the big red button and letting rescuers guess what the nature of the situation is based on you position.

Being two-way, the other advantage of the inreach is that rescuers can ask you questions and tell you when they expect to arrive etc.

That said, the delta in functionality between what the iphone will offer and what an inreach offers in an emergency situation is probably not enough for the vast majority of people to want to purchase an inreach and a subscription, unless they also have a use for non-emergency communication outside of cell coverage.

Also, at least where I am from, search and rescue never sends helicopters in the night, because it is too dangerous.

Likewise if the weather is less than perfect, which occurs frequently in mountainous areas.

At that point I wonder when quadcopters or fixed-wing UAVs will be feasible to at least establish visual contact with the sender of an emergency signal and/or drop off a sat-phone for bidirectional contact - there have been model aircraft capable of crossing the Atlantic [1] after all, and modern quadcopters like the DJI Matrice have something like an hour of flight time and 80 km/h speed so these could carry emergency supplies as well, no matter the terrain.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAM_5

[2] https://www.diyphotography.net/djis-new-matrice-300-rtk-dron...

It’s already being done in a few places. But think bigger- the Royal Navy has done sea trails where they use drones to drop life rafts to sailors overboard. These aren’t little DJIs - look at the Malloy T150 and 400. The latter can also carry people and cargo up to 180kg (65kg for the former). These are in military service today with the Royal Marines and in Ukraine.

UK Border Force also uses a Tekever AR5 UAS over the English Channel to look for people crossing. It could be pretty useful in a SAR-situation though; 20 hour endurance carrying 50KG.

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-border-agency-tasked-dron...

Think bigger also automatically means "think way more expensive". I was more thinking about something that can be placed in a small charging pod around the entrances of popular but dangerous areas.

72 hours is way better than never if you’re incapacitated or lost. Risk/reward probably depends on what you like to do and where you like to go.

imho with an inreach its mostly that i can message friends and family if something happens from deadly serious to "my truck broke down 100km down a FSR, please send a tow truck!" to "we are running late but OK". inreach has proven to be worth every penny and them some.

In the backcountry help is farther away than it is in the city. That applies no matter how you call for help. I've got an inReach but I would expect it to be hours from pushing the button to help showing up unless it was something very urgent and there happened to be a chopper around that could reach where I was. On top of the highest peak in the area I wouldn't be surprised at help taking 8 hours to arrive.

As for whether it's worth it--it depends on what you're doing. As a backcountry hiker that often goes solo I consider it essential insurance. If something happens that's likely the only way I would get help rather than ending up like the guy on our local mountains that disappeared a couple of weeks ago--certainly dead by now (there's no water to be had) but his body hasn't been found.

What you would hope is that there is a small monthly fee (say a few bucks) to have the service and then a "usage fee" for the random unlikely time you use the service. So imagine paying $2 a month to have the service on and then $75 each time you use it. Use it once every 3 years (which seems like a lot for the intended user base) and it's only ~$4 a month.

And that seems about right compared to SPOT monthly pricing, considering it's intended for much greater usage than one time every 3 years.

I don't think that comparison holds. What Apple is doing is making a crucial rescue tool, the distress beacon, near-ubiquitous. In a few years, any major-ish emergency involving people rich enough to own iPhones will have a working distress beacon around. This isn't like an InReach that you get and subscribe because you expect you might end up in an emergency, this is something that'll be around without even an awareness of danger and the optics of letting that potential go to waste carry a cost as well. Imagine a plane goes down in a remote area, a dozen iPhones on board but no one got the subscription. They might even end up eating the costs for genuine distress calls just for the marketing value of the iPhone saving hundreds of lives a year, or they might just charge a large sum for non-subscription distress calls and eat the cost in case the bear got there first.

Besides, if they included a few tweet-sized non-emergency text messages and location updates a day in a reasonably priced subscription, I bet that would sell like hotcakes in outdoorsy circles. People bring their phone anyway, so 2-3 iPhones on your party might make the InReach redundant. I'd love that.

I wouldn't say it would make the inReach redundant, although it's going to take a substantial bite out of the low end of the market. I pay extra for unlimited pings on a 10 minute interval--even if I can't call for help when I'm reported overdue they'll know where I am.

I also think my inReach can take a lot more abuse than an iPhone.

I also think it will drive the satellite guys to offer a different service--SOS only, you pre-pay a fixed price that doesn't expire. (Actually, we already have a limited version of this--personal locator beacons have no monthly cost but have to be sent in for refurbishment if used. They are highly reliable but carry nothing but ID and GPS, you can't alter the message.)

I pay spot ~$12/month for unlimited satellite tracking on a 10 minute interval on what I believe is the same network.

The garmin gps you can pay only the months you need it.

I'm assuming this will be the same – a monthly subscription that you can pause whenever and turn on for months when you are hiking in the wilderness, on your boat etc.

Gov should subsidise it for everyone, not just Apple and Globestar. Emergency beacons should be given for free at every park. Thats a massive cost saving in terms of search and lost lives.

It might lead to _more_ search costs; people head off into sketchy situations safe in the knowledge that if they press a little button a SAR helicopter will be scrambled.

Which it almost certainly won’t be. A SAR team will probably be dispatched when it is safe to do so. Which may take a day or more. It’s a limitation of a personal locator beacon. It had better be a real emergency and even then you have to wait. Location fixes may also not always be reliable.

They could charge $50k for 1 day of use after the fact, and people would still be happy for that option. Rescues are not cheap to begin with.

Haha no, they would call the literally space-age thing that saved their lives "price gouging" and point as Apple's profits as evidence that every human is entitled to this service for free.

Every human is entitled for this service. This should be free, like GPS.

If the government was running it, maybe.

Even government-run services cost money (usually much more than private ones). And the government gets its money from us, not from the sky.

Yeah, but the government can collect money via taxes, which allows it to solve coordination problems that would be more difficult for private companies to solve.

The birds aren't cheap, the rescue coordination centers (they know who to talk to, they have no ability to actually go into the field--although that's not always needed. Garmin recently mentioned one--SOS comes in "found lost child". 25 minutes later, SOS comes in "lost child"; all they had to do is direct them to where the other was) have to be staffed--and both are private.

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