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I thought one of the big use cases for this was to track stolen items, like a backpack or maybe even a bicycle. But the "anti-stalking" feature will notify someone if an AirTag they don't own appears to be traveling with them. Does this render it useless for anti-theft, then? Since it will just notify a thief that the bike they just stole is being tracked, and they can look for the AirTag and throw it in the nearest…
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To be fair, replaceable batteries in laptops and phones also used to be the status quo and Apple successfully changed that. Just because it’s the status quo wouldn’t prevent Apple from “thinking different”.
It wouldn't, but in this specific case they didn't. Did apple bring any actual innovation that I missed? That's why I was proposing wireless charging, that would've actually been a nice step forward.
I guess it depends on what you think of as innovation. Their marketing pointed to "scalloped" batteries instead of square so they can take up more empty space (plus the space that would have been used by covering the battery and a fatter connector).
In my experience, their batteries went from 200 charge cycles, about ~4 of battery life, and often failing before reaching it's end of life to 1000 charge cycles, about 8-10hrs of battery life, and rarely getting "service" warnings suggesting replacement. At least last time I needed to swap batteries I just needed a small screwdriver.
I was very concerned when they ditched removable batteries because that was one part I constantly had problems with. Since those issues were address I'm very glad they went that way.
> AirTag is designed for over a year’s worth of battery life with everyday use. The CR2032 battery is user-replaceable and widely available. Replacement batteries are sold separately. That's the piece of information I wanted to know first. Devices like this can be built, but those can't run on batteries for a reasonable time frame. Apple made it practical.
As pointed out above, this is already the status quo (replacable battery, 1 year life, etc). Tile has had it for years. I'm curious if it would've been technically feasible to have wireless charging on these instead of replaceable battery. Or would that greatly increase the price?
I thought one of the big use cases for this was to track stolen items, like a backpack or maybe even a bicycle. But the "anti-stalking" feature will notify someone if an AirTag they don't own appears to be traveling with them. Does this render it useless for anti-theft, then? Since it will just notify a thief that the bike they just stole is being tracked, and they can look for the AirTag and throw it in the nearest…
Maybe this changes when you turn on stolen mode for the tagged item.
EDIT: Thank you for all the suggestions!
I'm aware that this is possible from another iPhone or iWatch or iPad -- this is the current workflow. Use my phone or take the ipad away from the kids to play the beep. Is a button on the wall too much to ask for?
I've actually experimented with the iCloud API to try to get this functionality to work, but it's not a supported API so I run into the uncrossable chasm of "put your password in this python file and voila!".
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not yet. If a significant portion of otherwise theft-friendly bikes have trackers, I don't see why they wouldn't learn to, someone would probably even commoditize the sniffing tech to sell to other thiefs.
> not yet. If a significant portion of otherwise theft-friendly bikes have trackers, I don't see why they wouldn't learn to, someone would probably even commoditize the sniffing tech to sell to other thiefs. They wouldn't because we already have TONS of historical data that thieves don't do that. I am a motorcycle lover and like every owner of a nice bike I know that apart from properly chaining your bike down the si…
Their modus operandi is to throw a bicycle into a truck or van, move them in lots of fifty across state lines, and tear them down to components.
Any trackers will be quickly rendered useless once they're in the van, and immediately found and discarded.
I'm definitely planning on getting Airtags for my bikes, but mostly for amusement and occasionally forgetting where I parked, I don't have much faith in them as an anti-theft device.
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The random ID has a fixed suffix in the spec, so you can infer that it’s the same AirTag if you see the same suffix across multiple rotations.
how long is the suffix? I can't see it being effective for both anti-stalking (ie. someone placing a tag on you without your consent) and anti-tracking (ie. shops/malls using your tag to follow you around).
Meanwhile, if you're trying to use these things to track visitors to your store, you're only getting 16 bins of people. My "E" tag will be the same as 50 other people who've visited last week with the same "E" suffix.
I'm having a hard time finding the actual whitepaper on this. Hopefully someone links it in this thread.
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From the link: "iOS devices can also detect an AirTag that isn’t with its owner, and notify the user if an unknown AirTag is seen to be traveling with them from place to place over time."
So what about the majority of people who do not own an iOS device? They can be tracked? Somehow I don't see this idea working out when law makers start seeing what kind of things this product enables.