by No cellular service? No problem. Apple’s (AAPL) latest features enable satellite communications, part of a series of technological innovations unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that sent the company’s shares to an all-time high on Tuesday.
Yahoo Finance technology editor Dan Howley joins Kurt Knight, Apple’s senior director of platform product marketing, to demonstrate the new feature for sending texts and other emergency messages.
“When you’re offline, you can still share your location with friends and family. [Requesting] roadside assistance, so if you have some vehicle problems, even if you don’t have cell phone connectivity, you can still get help,” Knight tells Yahoo Finance.
Knight explains that the satellite feature is an extension of existing offerings, like Emergency SOS, but he clarifies that emergencies aren’t the only use case: “It’s a whole form of communication,” he says.
This article was written by Gabriel Roy
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Video transcript
All, we are here with Kurt Knight.
He is the senior director of product platform marketing for I Os, ipad, Os and Mac Os.
Kurt.
Thank you very much for being with us.
What can you tell us about satellite for messaging?
Thank you.
I’m excited to be here.
Um Messages via satellite is a feature we introduced yesterday.
It’s part of a series of satellite features we’ve introduced over the years.
Um And this is all about when you’re off the grid, you don’t have cellular, you don’t have Wi-Fi, you’ll still be able to text and message your friends.
And then I guess, you know, when you’re out of regular cell phone range, how does, how does it work?
How does it take up what you are doing?
Knowing when you are in range of satellites is incredible as the phone can tell when it is out of cellular network and when you are out of cellular networks satellites are available everywhere and it is there talk directly from your phone call to space with a satellite and then that satellite can transmit the information back to earth again, it’s incredible technology.
So there is the ability to send messages.
But I mean, how, how much can you send?
What, what can you send?
Yes, is it limited to text only?
It’s just like sending a message today and you can send as many as you want.
There is no limit to it.
So you see, we have this prompt automatically on the lock screen, it knows I’m off the grid.
Um And so I can just tap here and it’s going to bring up the link assistant.
And so in this one space, uh you can see we’ve found X there in Cupertino and I have a set of satellite features available.
U Of course, there are messages via satellite.
We’re going to get into that in a second.
There is access to my.
So when you’re off the grid, you can share your location with friends and family with roadside assistance.
So if you have some vehicle problems, even if you don’t have mobile phone connectivity, you can still get help and then S OS emergency let me show you inside messages.
You will get this experience right here to connect to satellite.
Maybe I can bring this up to get a little better insight into how I need to do it.
So it does a very good job of telling me what I need to do to stay connected to the satellite.
So I’m going to close that I’m going to go here to send a text message to Alex and I’m going to say satellite message coming in and I’m going to send it.
And so right now that’s going up to space and back down again.
And I’ll also go ahead and send an emoji over too because you can just text, you can emoji.
Um both.
It’s unbelievable right now, it’s going 800 miles in space, the satellite is moving 15,000 MPH.
Um Why don’t you see the smell indicator?
Um, it’s already gone up and down again.
That’s um, so Alex sees this.
Um, he’s already given me an answer.
I can answer it with a tap back.
These new beautiful taps are back and I was 18, I can scroll over where you can see, I can also tap back with emoji.
Now I will do the uh Yes, absolutely.
Um So that’s messaging via satellite via iMessage.
This works um also in S MS.
Hence it gets the widest use.
Basically anyone with a phone can send them a message via satellite.
And I guess what do you see as the use case for this?
I went out for a walk.
I’m not very good at it and I got lost.
Do I just need to get in touch with somebody because I went camping and I’m, you know, trying to make sure I can still get in touch with my wife which I think is the great thing about it this is a great extension of what we were doing.
We’ve had features like S OS emergency before which are great life saving features.
And this really widens the opening of what we can do.
You can be out camping maybe and just want to check in and see, you know, maybe how the family is doing.
You can say hello.
Um Or maybe it’s something very important.
It’s, it’s kind of the whole gamut of communication, what would you want to use it for?
Thankfully, I only carcamp uh because I’m too big of a kid to do real camping.
Um I guess just because, like the last one, you know, what uh is a subscription service?
How does it, how does it work uh in that regard?
So this is part of the series of satellite features that we re-introduced starting two years ago and as an iPhone 14 or iPhone 15 user, you get two years of free services as part of your phone and then you can just go from there if you want to continue.
And then yes, we’ll announce more details later on how that plays out.
Awesome, Kurt.
Thank you very much for being with us.
It is much appreciated.
Thank you.
Definitely.
Thank you.
