Apple invested $450 million in a satellite-powered SOS system. We tested it out and it’s awesome.
An SOS is supposed to sound an alarm in case of emergency, but how well are you supposed to know how to use it if you’re a new smartphone owner? That’s a question Apple wants to answer, and a large chunk of $450 million it put into its SOS system over the course of two years, as part of its Smart Battery initiative.
Apple doesn’t put all its money into hardware. The company makes a lot of software. Apple is a software and hardware company with a lot of money and a lot of cash, which is why it spends so much on hardware. It’s still hard to think of a phone as a “sport” device.
But there are a few things about the iPhone that make it perfect for a gadget to track and record things as they happen. What Apple does with the software — especially when it was built into the company’s own software — is what sets it apart from pretty much every other business out there.
We’ll begin with how the company is building the software.
The first thing you see when you open the iPhone is the familiar icon called Control Center, which you saw almost everywhere on Apple’s phones from the early days. In fact, the Control Center in its earliest iterations was actually a graphical user interface for an e-mail client, iChat.
The icon, which shows the iPhone taking a selfie, and the icon for the iPhone’s calendar, are the two fundamental elements of the iPhone.
You might think that’s strange, considering that the user interface for the Calendar app is called Mail, and the user interface for the Photos app is called Photos. (The Apple-sanctioned versions of these apps are called apps, not icons.) But you see the two icons because both programs are part of the same iCloud backup/restore system.
If I use an iPhone app, it goes to the iCloud,
