Yeah, thats what I was trying to say.

The Coast Guard search is one thing but God bless the poor parents. I cant imagine losing my kid let alone not know what happened.

I think they found the boat during the search with the planes. My guess is they called in the location for them to go by sea.

If the phone was powered on it could have been GPS'd by the cell phone carrier within a few hours of them going missing.
Chances are it ran out of charge early on or was out of cell tower range.
Other than using it for that purpose whats kind of clue could there possibly be?? You gonna ask Siri what happened?????

Anyone can Monday morning quarterback the professionals who made decisions as the situation was unfolding from behind a computer 9 months later.

First the phone doesn’t have to be on for cell towers to know where it is. Jails are full of criminals who thought that. You have to take the battery out and sometimes that don’t even work until the internal power goes completely away.
As for the phone itself, how about a plan to go to the Bahamas and directions they planned on taking. Don't think they would have done an open water crossing without gps if they had it. Even if they did without gps the phone would have stayed hooked up to towers until it didn't and would have given the exact time they left and a general direction to search instead of just search "out there". Also not sure about 6 but iphone 5's gps works off of satellites not towers. Or there could have been a suicide pac talked about on the phone (kids text everything not use the phone). Or meeting up with an off shore drug dealer. Or maybe they saw (drug dealer or poacher) they shouldn’t have. Maybe one wanted to kill the other for screwing his girlfriend. Maybe it was something as simple as a tank of bad gas or a breakdown. Who knows? I just know with my extremely limited experience in these matters I would have secured and looked in the boat (the only clue to what happened) for what was there and what was not like signs of a struggle, breakdown, life preservers, personal stuff or an anchor and if I found a phone it would have been #1 to find out what was on it. Hell there could be video tape or pictures on it of exactly what happened live and in color. I know my 14 and 15 year olds, their phones are physically attached to their hands so I could see when having trouble one of them pulling out their phones and taking a vid or picture for a future bookface or youtube post.
Anything could have helped back then (a Discovery Channel crew just found a lost castaway on an island off the coast of Australia) and leaving the boat out there for towboat to get (when they can’t seem to find their own asses most times) was irresponsible at a minimum and more like negligent. They could have stayed on station long enough for another boat/ship to get it in sight. They could have had every mariner with a radio to go to that location with a simple radio call. Now that its 9 months later at least it may be good for what happened but loosing that boat and the phone that was in it was a major screw up.

Whenever there's an incident of this nature speculation is rampant , and it's not surprising to see it here , probably because of the nature of the 'reporting' .
I can't recall it being said anywhere in the early reports when the boat was located as to whether it was still upright and afloat or capsized . Knowing that fact would determine the action that the CG originally took .
IF it was still upright and floating then there would have been no reason for them not to do a preliminary search . However , if it was capsized then a quick dive underneath to determine that there were no bodies still accompanying the boat would have sufficed and the CG would have probably decided that a boat capable of salvage was needed as opposed to a simple tow back to port .
One of the photos released showing the boat just before the freighter secured it clearly shows that it was inverted , surface submerged and had a large chunk missing from the hull . It's possible that if it was in this same condition when the CG initially found it they had no way to get it onto their boat and it would also have been much harder to locate later on for the other guys .

Boat was found originally off Daytona and it was capsized. From memory, CG was on scene with a chopper and sent a diver to confirm it was the boat and that it was unoccupied. The next order of business was to refocus the search pattern, not rescue an old boat 75 miles offshore.

IMO the Coast Guard helicopter should have stayed with the boat until a CG boat could get to it to look for evidence. There very well could be clues on that iPhone. Now after so many months in a marine environment who know if data can be retrieved from that phone. I support Apple on their previous stands but I hope that they offer their resources to access the phone. There could be pictures, texts, calls that might bring some closure for the families.

I was at the inlet the day of the storm.....weather was nasty on land, nevermind on an open boat offshore. My opinion, kids were capsized very early in their trip but probably didn't survive the first night in the water. They might have been able to see land and tried to swim for it, current was running out the inlet at 2-3 knots which made swimming to shore impossible for even Michael Phelps. They simply got tired and either drowned or got grabbed by sea life. The cell phone is a waste of time being submerged in salt water for 6+ months. As far as "end of life" details, I suspect this rolled up fast and these kids were in the water in one big wave not texting cryptic end of life messages.

Since the story broke the parents have raised over 500K (go fund me, go fund also keeps 8% of funds raised so they made 40K too!), got lots of new law proposals and subsequently are running 2 separate foundations in the names of the kids. 2 things have never been really addressed: 1. kids bought $100 worth of fuel (no small amount for kids, they certainly wouldn't have put that much in the boat if they were planning to troll just outside the inlet for an hour or two 2. Kids took grandpa's boat without permission (one kid had his own boat but was grounded from using it, so they took another boat).

There is video of the CG talking with a diver at the boat, radio confirms "zero POB"...zero persons onboard and they pulled the diver out of the water and moved on. I would have thought they marked the boat with a tracking device to get it later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xCB7--6JkM

As a side note:

I was at the Biltmore Hotel this weekend with my kids, they have the biggest hotel pool in Florida (their own pitch), pool is 600K gallons and is over 1/2 acre. Guessing 250 X 100 as a size. I told my kids to swim the length of the pool and they could stop at the far wall (1/2 way point) and then swim back. Essentially a 500 ft swim roundtrip in a perfect environment (no waves, no salt water, no storm, etc). Both kids and their friend did it but were visibly winded (I did the same up and back an hour earlier and stopped a couple times (stood on bottom)......my arms felt like logs! My lesson for them was: Stay with the boat!

We had another lost boater 2 weekends ago. 3 guys and a 11 yr old in a 24 ft searay. The guy that stayed with the boat washed back to shore, the the other 3 died.

The Biltmore Pool (video is taken from the middle of the pool):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnNbbM9fZMo