Earlier quoted context omitted.
It won’t last a year on a $1 battery nor will it be as small.
A Tile will, so will SmartThings
A tile doesn’t use mobile data and have gps and is inferior to an AirTag anyway
Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
21–30 of 404 posts
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#22Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping and rogue alerts to a threshold my wife gets them from my keys or wallet all the time. Then they just beep randomly. I regret buying them to be honest. Tile never really got harped on for stalking. The samsung trackers work just as well as Apple and don't have a…
Tile still isn't getting harped for stalking. I used a Tile to track down a backpack thief 5 years ago, could have easily been a person I was stalking.
Apple's getting a lot of flack because they're enormous, consumers are more aware, and they have a better network... but the fact that they did any stalker alerting is beyond anything the existing products in the market have done. I'd guess the product designers at Apple are probably constantly frustrated with this reality.
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#23I assume Apple only cares enough about the anti-stalking feature to avoid significant negative press.
As others have pointed out, you can buy small GPS trackers without anti-stalking features already, and those will only get smaller / better battery life over time.
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#24Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping and rogue alerts to a threshold my wife gets them from my keys or wallet all the time. Then they just beep randomly. I regret buying them to be honest. Tile never really got harped on for stalking. The samsung trackers work just as well as Apple and don't have a…
I haven't experienced the same issues you describe in terms of random beeping or the like. But I do think one of the most curious and irritating missing pieces from AirTags is no sort of tie-in with Family Sharing or some sort of contacts whitelist. I saw one thing saying that was about privacy but that makes zero sense because Apple doesn't do the same thing elsewhere in "Find My" for people or devices. While it's correctly opt-in, once everyone has done so we can see device locations for all of the family's stuff, which is very helpful when somebody is missing their phone or the like (anyone else can help with it) as well as checking in disasters. I don't see why that would be fine but keys wouldn't. In terms of privacy, someone is more likely to have their watch, phone or airpods on them then an Apple Tag frankly. Indeed that's the core logic of Apple Tags, we put down and misplace other random stuff but still have our phones/wearables. It can't be that rare for a family to have multiple vehicles where a certain amount of sharing happens, particularly if it's a pattern like us where the SO and I each have a car but then there is a single old truck that we both use. Family names are on the insurance, legally it's multidriver property. And even good friends/room mates probably share some kinds of property. Whomever has it is responsible for not losing it and thus has an interest in tracking it.
Yeah it's a v1.0, but even so when Apple already has all this infrastructure up strikes me as an odd omission that significantly detracts from the utility for no good end. Even a basic "ignore this tag for a day/week/year/permanently" would at least help sand down a bit of the most irritating notification spam. And worth noting that this sort of thing is a genuine security/privacy issue too: in real security systems, the human factor matters a lot. If people get spammed with noise, they will inevitably end up ignoring it when an actual signal turns up. We've known this forever.
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#25Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping and rogue alerts to a threshold my wife gets them from my keys or wallet all the time. Then they just beep randomly. I regret buying them to be honest. Tile never really got harped on for stalking. The samsung trackers work just as well as Apple and don't have a…
Samsung trackers do not work nearly as well imo. Or tile for that matter. I’ve tried most of them and AirTags are clearly on another level for better or worse I do think AirTags should have a button like the Samsung ones, tho.
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Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#26Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping and rogue alerts to a threshold my wife gets them from my keys or wallet all the time. Then they just beep randomly. I regret buying them to be honest. Tile never really got harped on for stalking. The samsung trackers work just as well as Apple and don't have a…
Tile still isn't getting harped for stalking. I used a Tile to track down a backpack thief 5 years ago, could have easily been a person I was stalking. Apple's getting a lot of flack because they're enormous, consumers are more aware, and they have a better network... but the fact that they did any stalker alerting is beyond anything the existing products in the market have done. I'd guess the product designers at Ap…
Tile also isn't nearly as sensitive because it needs people to install their app to opt-in to their tracking network.
Apple coopted every single phone into a tracker essentially creating a biggest people following and tracking network in the world - plus they use UWB which massively more accurate than what Tile uses.
What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#27Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping and rogue alerts to a threshold my wife gets them from my keys or wallet all the time. Then they just beep randomly. I regret buying them to be honest. Tile never really got harped on for stalking. The samsung trackers work just as well as Apple and don't have a…
I love my AirTags because they actually have a functional tracking network. I've lost items outside the house with a Tile tracker attached and it proved to be entirely worthless for actually finding my stuff. They simply don't have a good network.
They need to switch over to Helium's LoRa network, which has vastly better coverage...
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#28I guess I don't get it. For the price of an AirTag, you can buy a more capable tracker with GPS and mobile data. And it won't be notifying the trackee that it's there. The AirTag seems like a downgrade.
What tracker is comparable in price? An AirTag is $30 with no other monthly costs. Genuinely asking, I would love to find a better solution.
A quick search on Amazon for 'gps tracker' will yield at least one option on the first page for $29.99. GSM for communications. Not as small as an AirTag, but 1.5 inches by 0.9 by 0.6 inches isn't exactly huge either.
A legitimate point is that the battery life isn't great. But that's not too hard to solve, if you tolerate a little more space for a bigger battery.
I'm sure there are even better options out there, that's just what I could come up with in under a minute. For anybody with more than idle curiosity, I imagine there are some pretty clever solutions available.
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It won’t last a year on a $1 battery nor will it be as small.
A Tile will, so will SmartThings
Tile does not have nearly the network that Apple does. I attached an AirTag to an electric scooter, which I ended up returning. I forgot to remove the AirTag; I've been able to track the scooter over hundreds of miles with quick updates (even driving down a freeway). I've been having a fun time checking in on the scooter for months now.
I have a Tile attached to a generator at my house. Since I've disabled Tile on my phone in favor of AirTag, my generator hasn't been detected in over 31 days. Even with neighbors walking past my house constantly.
Re: Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
#30So this is a failed product then. Too good for tracking because it can be abused. While the new version alerts the thieves in the intended use case. Should have been given a 10x-50x price tag right from the start, to make it less available and affordable for malicious activities.