sirbryan

Ditto. I cut my teeth on HyperCard on a Mac SE in middle and high school.  I had the fortune of meeting him outside of the Mosconi Center during WWDC a few years ago, where he was showing a few of us an app he was working on that was related to his photography.

MplsP said:

If T-Mobile signs with starlink it may obviate the issue. Having the service with the carrier rather than the device manufacturer makes more sense, anyway. 

They already did. The concept is that Starlink uses T-Mobile's spectrum, converting all of their birds into LEO cell towers.  If the phone (iPhone or not) has a T-Mobile SIM, and if it can "see/hear" a Starlink satellite, it'll get service.

It was announced a couple years ago, and has been in beta for a little while now.

This competition between them all means that, as an iPhone user on T-Mobile, you get the best of all of it: the phone will try to establish a 4G/LTE/5G connection to towers first, then a Starlink bird, then, as last resort, a satellite-only connection to Globalstar.

That's a French AZERTY keyboard.

It's tempting to put in an offer, just to see what the demand truly is.  Unless you're a collector or museum, I think the novelty would wear off and then you'd be wishing it was faster.

I have an Apple IIe and two Mac SE's that boot up beautifully.  I download fun classic games from the Internet via my iPhone and the cassette port to the Apple IIe.  I had a couple hard drives for the SE's, but they're showing their age.  I've considered SCSI to SD-card adapters for those, which would make them fast and silent.

Or I could gut all three of them and put some Mac Mini's, Intel NUCs, or Raspberry Pi's inside, with vMac, SheepShaver, Basilisk, etc.

Many commenters seem to assume that satellite signals can be had anywhere, anytime, globally.

Typically communications satellites are geosynchronous; they appear stationary to us from the ground. This way the uplink stations don't have to have directional tracking antennas. Most TV, telephone, and Internet systems are this way (think Dish Network, DirecTV, HugesNet, ViaSat, etc.).  Even my Starlink dish stays pointing in one direction, even though their satellites are much closer in Low Earth Orbit.

If you don't have a bird (satellite) covering a particular country, that service won't work in that place.

Some providers may have birds moving in non-geosynchronous orbits (i.e. north-south or at various sloping angles, faster or slower than the earth spins, etc.), so in those cases, you'd have a store-and-forward messaging system. SpaceX alluded to this being the case for how their collaboration with T-Mobile might work. In that case, while their service could technically work anywhere in the world, they're beholden to regulatory bodies when transmitting on licensed frequencies in International air space.  And again, the birds need to communicate with the ground at some point to pass the messages on.

I'm guessing a lot of people didn't watch the event.

This will use a thin slice of existing T-Mobile mid-band (PCS, 1900-2100MHz) spectrum, which they have licenses for across the entire US.  This isn't necessarily 5G, and they said "the phone you already have."  I'm guessing that they'll only need to implement the 4G/LTE spec (or a lite version of it), enough to support voice and simple data.

According to Musk, the antennas to support this will be roughly 5-7 meters wide and tall, and there will be serious electronics involved to counteract doppler effect etc. Because cell phones transmit omnidirectionally, cell antennas on towers are already designed to be really big ears to pick up the weakest of signals.  Licensed spectrum is much quieter than Part 15 (unlicensed) bands where WiFi and baby monitors and IoT devices live.  So they wouldn't have put out the "vaporware" if they didn't believe there was technical capability. 

There's also only so much bandwidth available (2-4Mbps) for the whole spot beam, so they're starting with the easy stuff. SMS uses the SS7 signaling network (which runs on most telco phone switches across two 56K channels). They've got oodles of bandwidth to support texting and messaging, and with store-and-forward capabilities onboard the bird, that part's pretty much figured out.

Since T-Mobile already owns the spectrum, the biggest challenge could be regulatory issues.