Apparently it works with Find My as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they started rolling out premium features that take more bandwidth once everybody's free two years expires.

This is it right here! The "emergency" part is a feel-good on top of the real service, which is location updates every X time even when off in no cell service land.

"every X time" meaning as often as you're willing to point your phone at a satellite and wait a few minutes for your location to transmit?

That I don’t know - I could see it trying to send a signal every five minutes and hoping some get through.

I doubt it. Thats a great way to murder your battery in the wilderness

Yea this must be the main feature. And is pretty huge. The emergency thing is icing on the cake.

Unfortunately GlobalStar is probably one of the worst satellite constellations out there (that I know of at least) for actual communication (SPOT devices used or still use GlobalStar and are famously crap compared to Garmin inReach on Iridium). Of course it could be improved and they do have the bandwith licenses which is important.

Job skill is relative. I'm sure everyone's job would be considered "low skill" to some people.

Who considers software engineering to be "low skill"? What about doctors, lawyers, etc?

People can "consider" anything they want. That doesn't mean it's accurate.

And I returned mine after learning that all the press about it not requiring a Facebook account wasn't actually accurate until today. Kind of a coincidence that the price went up $100 right before this went through.

Or putting the power button back on the top. Or going back to the iPhone 5's round volume buttons.

Both the placement and shape of the buttons leads to accidental presses and the inability to easily identify them by feel. Almost anything would be an improvement.

I do kind of wonder how much the new repair-friendly Apple has to do with the fact that they lose basically the entire laptop's margin every time they have to replace a battery under warranty.

MIL-SPEC just means it conforms to a spec. Whether that means "rugged" or just "standardized" really depends on why and when the spec was written.

I've managed production of a number of "MIL-SPEC" parts over the years. Usually it just meant documentation and traceability.

and that is just the kind of assurance some consumers are willing to pay for.. with sophistication in manufacturing quality can be made to be varied from batch to batch. Sometimes they don't even bother, ie. I no longer trust board revision from gigabyte, same rev diff layout diff components are far too common. not sure how it's economical, but the fact that it IS economical tells me something is way off.

I think real justice would include an absolutely enormous fine to the company for tying up 20 years of court resources over a case they were clearly wrong about.

The plaintiff may not have incurred any legal costs, but the railway certainly cost the court a lot of money over the years.

> money, interests, brand loyalty, level of education, people they meet, life rhythm, etc

All of this is widely available from your browsing history and social media. And every marketing database on earth already has your income level.

I like to bring this up whenever FlightRadar24 is mentioned.

They heavily censor their feed. Not only for military aircraft, but they also have a service where you can pay to have your aircraft hidden by the system.

Personally my beef with them is that they started as a paid app, then transitioned to a subscription model and left everyone who bought the app hanging.

> I only get notifications on my watch

This worked really well for me. My phone is always silent/DND, but I get notifications on my watch. If I want to stop getting notifications, I just take off my watch.