[mikestew]

not that huge of an antenna...

I would argue that you’ve just illustrated my point. It also wouldn’t take a lot to convince me that you’re being facetious.

[Fatalist_ma]

Well it's a finger-sized antenna. Admittedly all I know about antennas is that size matters. An Iphone is bigger than a finger, why is it inconceivable that it could have a comparable antenna on its surface? Also for an Iphone this would be just one rarely-used feature, it could get by with somewhat worse reception and lower bandwidth than a dedicated satellite phone.

[detaro]

"satellite phone, but doesn't work reliably" doesn't sound like something Apple would waste space and money on.

[dzhiurgis]

AirTags, MacBook Pro keyboards, iPhone 4, Siri

The list is endless.

[detaro]

At least two of those are not designed to be bad.

[lxgr]

Mobile phones used to have antennas like this in the early 2000s, and now they don‘t anymore. I don‘t know that much about antenna design, but I‘d suspect that there might be a similar opportunity here?