>Apple
>They add one new "free" feature

I did note that there was a line about satellite SOS coverage being free "for the first 2 years". Still excited to see Garmin get multiple competitors.

Garmin Reacts to Apple Watch Ultra: 'We Measure Battery Life in Months. Not Hours.'
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/09/garmin-reacts-to-apple-watch-ultra/

The thing is, I sat by the side of the Pacific Crest Trail for a few hours the other day. The majority of long-distance throughhikers had
- a smartphone
- wired headphones
- a solar panel on top of their backpacks.

So for a short trip, one "needs" one thing - my smartphone

For a long trip, one "needs" two things. Those could be any combo of smartphone + solar panel, smartphone + extra battery, smartphone + Garmin Inreach.

Meanwhile, most of the Garmin units are unusable without a smartphone except to send the pre-composed emergency message. So both people I know who use them, have to have a charged smartphone to make it work effectively.

The big value that Garmin is adding is for professional settings. One of the friends has the unit for work. He has a lot of rangers out in the field, including wilderness rangers, search and rescue and so forth. There is some sort of smart routing that Garmin offers at the professional level that lets calls go through Dispatch and be sent out to one or all or a subset and so forth. He thinks the system is fantastic and envisions still paying Garmin for their software and their service, just not their hardware.

No matter how I parse that, Garmin loses a lot of hardware sales. I still see people hiking with standalone GPS units, so sales don't drop to zero.

Starlink Speeds Drop Significantly in the US Amid Congestion Woes

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-speeds-drop-significantly-in-the-us-amid-congestion-woes

>>Starlink users in the US reached only 62.53Mbps

Perfect! Love these headlines. All those people who *had* to have Starlink because they are on horrible, awful, insane, unlivable 25mpbs connections will be falling back to earth

62.5mbps is, let's see, about 10X faster than a good day on Hughesnet and 100X faster than what you reliably get from Hughesnet in the evening when everyone comes home from work. Let it fall to 25mbps. That will get rid of the riff raff as they go back to their $50/mo DSL.

Starlink Now Selling Pricey High-Performance Dish to Residential Users ($2500)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-now-selling-pricey-high-performance-dish-to-residential-users

Saw that. Unfortunately, "35% more sky" in my case would likely mean just seeing more obstructions.

I would actually pay the $2500 if it solved the dropouts (or reduced them to a level where we could get rid of Hughesnet for Zoom screenshares), but I think my ultimate solution is fewer trees not a bigger dish :-)

Starlink UK satellites to connect broadband blackspots

https://techmonitor.ai/leadership/digital-transformation/starlink-uk-broadband-spacex