No cell phone service? No problem. The latest new features from Apple (AAPL) enable satellite communications, part of a series of technological innovations announced 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 is joined by Kurt Knight, Apple’s senior director of platform product marketing, to demo the new feature for sending both text and other emergency messages.
“You can still share your location with friends and family when you’re off the grid. [Requesting] Roadside assistance, so if you have some issues with the vehicle, you can still get help even if you don’t have a cell phone connection,” Knight tells Yahoo Finance.
Knight explains that the satellite feature is an extension of existing offerings like Emergency SOS, but he also explains that emergencies aren’t the only use case: “It’s kind of the whole spectrum of communications,” he says.
This article was written by Gabriel Roy.
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video transcript
Everyone, we’re here with Kurt Knight.
I Os is the senior director of product platform marketing for iPad, Os and Mac Os.
Kurd.
Thank you for joining us.
What can you tell us about the message satellite?
Thank you.
I’m so excited to be here.
Sending messages via Um Satellite is a feature we introduced yesterday.
It’s part of a series of satellite features we’ve offered over the years.
Um And it’s all about when you’re off the grid, when you don’t have a cell phone, when you don’t have Wi Fi, you can still send and text your friends.
And then I guess, when you’re outside of normal cell phone coverage, how does this happen, how does it work?
How does he perceive what you do?
How it knows you’re within satellite coverage is absolutely incredible, as the phone can tell when the cellular network is down, and when you’re outside of cellular networks it turns out that satellites are omnipresent and can talk directly to your device. The phone is sent into space to a satellite and then that satellite can beam the information back to earth, this is incredible technology.
So there is the ability to send messages.
But I mean how, how many can you send?
What, what can you send?
Is it limited to text only?
It’s just like sending a message today and you can send as many times as you want.
There is no limitation on this.
You see, this command automatically appears on the lock screen, it knows that I am off the network.
When I tap here, this connection assistant will appear.
And you can see in this area that X has found us in Cupertino and has a number of satellite capabilities that I can use.
Of course, there are also messages via satellite.
We’ll get into that in a moment.
Find mine.
So you can continue to share your location with friends and family with roadside assistance when you’re off the grid.
So if you have some issues with the vehicle, you can still get help even if you don’t have a cell phone connection and then the urgent S’s let me show you inside the messages.
You get this experience right here to connect to the satellite.
I might bring this up to get a little better insight into how I should do it.
So it does a really good job of letting me know what I need to do to stay connected to the satellite.
So I’m going to close it out and go over here to send Alex a text message and say satellite message is coming and I’ll send that too.
And right now it’s going up into space and coming back down again.
I’ll also send an emoji because you can just text, you can make an emoji.
Both of them.
It’s absolutely incredible right now, it’s going 800 mph through space, the satellite is moving at 15,000 MPH.
Um Can’t see the scent indicator?
He’s already had his ups and downs again.
This is um, so Alex sees this.
He already answered me.
I can answer him with a back tap.
There’s a nice new back tap and I was 18 I can swipe where you can see I can also tap back with an emoji.
Now I’ll do this: Yes, definitely.
That is, messages sent via satellite via iMessage.
This also works in S MS.
Thus, it has the widest usage.
You can basically send messages via satellite to anyone with a phone.
And I guess what do you see as the use case for this?
I went for a walk.
I’m not very good at this and I’m lost.
Do I need to contact someone because I went to camp and I want to make sure I can still communicate with my wife, which I think is the great thing about this is that it’s a huge expansion of the path to camp. we were doing
We had many features before, such as emergency S OS, which were extraordinary life-saving features.
And that really expands the scope of what we can do.
Maybe you’re out camping and just want to check in and see how the family is doing.
You can just say hello.
Or maybe it’s something really important.
This is kind of the whole scope of communication, what might you want to use it for?
Luckily I only do car camping because I’m too much of a baby to do real camping.
I guess lastly, is this a subscription service?
How does it work on this?
So this is part of the satellite features that we reintroduced two years ago and as an iPhone 14 or iPhone 15 user, you get two years of free service as part of your phone and then just go from there if you want to continue.
And yes, we will reveal more details about how this will happen later.
Great, Kurt.
Thank you for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Definitely.
Thank you.