The best camera is the one you have with you, and no-one[*] carries around an SLR camera these days.

Similarly, the best emergency-alert system is the one you have with you. Apple is playing the long game, getting their feet wet in a new area, and providing some value. They will iterate, it's what they do.

[1] For some definition of "no-one". Obviously some people do carry around SLR's but it's a tiny minority.

Isn't that pretty much what I said?

I carry an InReach mini in my airplane when flying over wilderness areas. Unfortunately I don’t think I could trust the iPhone. With the Garmin you can press one button and it’ll send out an emergency beacon without having to aim it.

Where are you flying out of curiosity? Flying over sparsely populated areas of rockies in Colorado, I very frequently have cell service. Having said that, nothing wrong with being prepared, I'm just curious about your situation. I might start doing that too. I always figured if I actually went down, landing would be the hard part, not staying alive once I landed.

Those full bars of coverage you had at altitude are probably going to disappear the moment you lose line-of-sight.

That said, aircraft have ELTs which are supposed to trigger on impact and can be manually activated as well, so an InReach probably wouldn't make a life-or-death difference very often.

Utah and Nevada, for the most part.

There are lots of great places to land, but being stuck in the desert without any way to communicate is a very real possibility (Ironically, even at many small town airports I’ve landed at).

Of course that's the hard part. But if you do survive the landing you'll be very glad you have communications available :)

To be fair I barely trust my InReach either. Overcast days, canyons, and any kind of tree cover consistently result in delayed or failed messages. And even if they report as "sent" on the device sometimes the recipient doesn't get them.

And for a dedicated device, the tracking feature is laughably bad with worse accuracy than my friend's watch.

Better than nothing in case of emergency but the reliability leaves a lot to be desired.

Are the messaging and emergency functions the same with those? For emergency beacons there is also a ~400Mhz frequency that is monitored independently (vs satellite communication at higher frequencies)

InReach uses the same 16xx Mhz Iridium frequency for everything. It does not have a 400Mhz PLB transmitter (which usually come with extendable antennas by the way, due to the ~ 70cm wavelength).

I would guess this feature is more for hikers, etc. who wouldn't really want to carry extra things if they could avoid it.

Even if it is a little worse, NO ONE is shelling out $600 for an InReach after this announcement. I am an avid backpacker who has resisted SatComs (partly for the price, partly because they ruin the experience maaaaan) and I can tell you with certainty that this put to bed any last chance of me purchasing an InReach