Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
One time I was driving down a twoo-lane road with a police car a few hundred feet behind me. An oncoming pickup truck veered several feet over the center line and almost hit me. I flagged the police down to tell them and they were nonplussed even though they literally saw it happen. Drunk driving, a greater threat than property theft, was of little consequence to them.
On the other side of the country my motorcycle got stolen and the police found it the next day. I picked it up from the tow yard shortly thereafter.
Switzerland is the Singapore of Europe (I mean this in a good way!) - the state just functions in a way that other European countries can only dream of
My car got broken into in Oakland, California. Multiple pieces of luggage stolen (yes, my fault for leaving it in the car in the first place). Luckily I had an AirTag that showed the exact location of the stolen items. I called the police but they said they couldn't do anything. Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in. Regardless, I was put on a waiting list, they finally called me back 3 days later. I promptly left the state a few months later.
Local police are never supposed to deal with immigration issues anyways, it isn't in their jurisdiction and they would have to call feds in to deal with anything related to it.
Generally, a city is called a sanctuary city if they don't honor hold orders on detainees from customs and immigration, it has nothing to do with police not enforcing immigration rules, which they can't do either way.
> most police departments won't pay the slightest bit of attention to your reports
Its sort of a combination of two reasons.
First in many cities, police departments are underfunded. And so running around looking for your stolen phone or whatever minor item is low on their to-do list compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shooting their brains out.
Second, for minor thefts most insurance companies just need a quick box-tick "police crime report number" before paying out. So if the police know they can get you off their backs just by quickly giving you a report number, well....
And it's probably under your deductible anyway. And replacing various cards is your deal with your credit card etc. companies. Relatively few of us carry around a lot of cash.
That's awesome. I'm glad that trackers have reached a price point, reliability and form factors that I can easily put one in everything I care about. I even have card ones in my wallet, my steam deck / e-reader case, etc.
Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.
Given that the battery in my Airtag lasts about a year, I'd rather have to exchange a CR2032 once per year than to buy a new tracker whenever the built-in rechargeable battery inevitably dies. (I think there are actually rechargeable CR2032s too – best of both worlds?)
> The new AirTag is designed with the environment in mind, with 85 percent recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and can be easily recycled.
I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
The fundamental issue preventing keyring aperture integration stems from the AirTag’s reliance on inverse-phase magnetic reluctance in the structural substrate.
You see, the enclosure maintains a precisely calibrated coefficient offramular expansion. Introducing a penetrative void would destabilize the sinusoidal depleneration required for proper UWB phase conjugation. The resulting spurving bearing misalignment could induce up to 40 millidarkness of signal attenuation.
Apple’s engineers attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators. Early prototypes with keyring holes exhibited catastrophic unilateral dingle-arm failure within mere minutes of deployment.
Until we develop lotus-o-delta-type bearings capable of withstanding the differential girdle spring modulation, I’m afraid keyring integration remains firmly in the realm of theoretical engineering—right up there with perpetual motion machines and TypeScript projects that compile without any // @ts-ignore comments.
The technology simply isn’t there yet.
Indeed, LLM's still suck at the cultural nuance required for humor. It's like they're writing for an audience that's too generic, so the joke doesn't truly "land" for anyone in particular.
> attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators
Wrote my PhD dissertation on this. It would've been in the literature for Apple's engineers to find, but unfortunately I lost institutional support to get this into a journal after my college (Mailorderdegrees.com, an FTX University^TM) folded mid-process.
I think the point is to make the smallest unit of functionality possible and then people can integrate that into their use case using attachments, casings, etc. in a way they see fit. It's a good approach for this product in my opinion.
I use quite a few varieties, including Apple's, and I have found Belkin’s to be an ideal one — small, secure, with a minimal footprint, and available with a keyring or a lanyard.
Different people want different attachment types (or no attachment point at all), so it makes sense for that to be external. I've used other trackers with integrated attachment points, and because the attachment point has to be very compact it tends to be flimsy or hard to fit.. vs the Apple one where you can add a larger attachment point that makes sense to you.
Right? Nokias had the equivalent of today's "case" built right into the design of the unit, plenty of durable plastic around the vulnerable parts -- the phone would've been considered unfit for sale if it couldn't survive a drop in out-of-the-box condition.
By the time you stripped a dumbphone down to be as vulnerable as one of today's is, it'd be a bare PCB. Nah, probably even in that state, I bet it could handle a drop better than a new iPhone straight out of the box.
What you buy today isn't a complete phone, it's just the guts. One tumble to pavement and you're out a grand. Heaven help you if you fumble it while trying to install the case that should've been part of it from the beginning.
And yet, we still buy them, because the alternatives are from shady manufacturers who never provide updates, and there is no third-party hardware that can run up-to-date iOS. If there was, I'd buy an iNokia in a heartbeat.
Yes, the phone case industry should exist. People want different things. Plenty of people are willing to go without a case entirely. For those who want a case, they want different tradeoffs between bulk and protection. They want different textures. It's OK to sell something that isn't all things to all people.
> For the initial disassembly, the AirTag is said to be the hardest to open to access the battery. Though all three could be opened by hand, the AirTag is suggested to be the hardest due to the lack of divots for grip.
Does the author lack thumbs? It’s easy to twist the battery open.
The lack of a divot prevents iFixit from selling an overpriced single use tool that exactly matches the divot shape for $50 USD that just so happens to be the exact same shape and material as a $0.05 guitar pick. Totally unacceptable, won't anyone think of the environment?!?!?!?!
There are third-party tags out there compatible with both Google and Apple's network that is roughly the same size and use the same battery, yet have a giant lanyard opening in the design to fit anything.
Apple could trivially have fit a usable hole if they wanted to. They just don't want to because they get to sell accessories with that now. Also, looking cleaner on its own helps sell even if that is an entirely useless quality for a tag tha tneeds to go into a bloody case.
Apple rarely offers direct discounts of closeout or excess merchandise. Instead to clear out back stock they’ll work with partner retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) who don’t mind the brand perception associated with offering deeper discounts.
First-gen AirTags have been on sale on Amazon frequently over the last year, and they’ll probably drop the price again soon.
This is a good example of how easy it is to fool people if they don’t have their own understanding of how things work.
Highlighting this has been a priority in my parenting. My child is having a great time trying to scare friends about the dangers of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in a surprisingly large number of manufactured foods.
But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.
I'd be a little wary of these numbers as regulation around advertising these kinds of figures normally permits mass balance systems[0] (which imo is tantamount to straight-up lying).
Mass balance is better than nothing I guess, & I understand the practical challenges with going further, but ultimately it's not what's implied by the marketing.
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these things that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it is the only way to have "the environment in mind".
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these thing that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it
I never thought I needed one until my wife lost her car keys, and the Fiat dealer charged $1,200 for a replacement.
And it's not even the electronics that makes them so expensive. Modern car keys aren't like the 1970's where it's just a piece of metal with the edges shaved off. Those little key cutting kiosks at Home Depot can't cope with today's complex engraving.
Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.
You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.
They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.
Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
Airpods are a great example of good UX making things seem simple. There's a ridiculous amount of engineering that goes into making them work as well as they do.
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
Maybe I got lucky, but I never had issues with my Bose, Shokz, or even with my Soundcore headphones and bluetooth. I don't use in ear, so I can not comment on that.
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.
I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).
I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.
It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.
Yep but with AirPods, you are listening music or watching a video, on your Mac, your iPhone rings (on your AirPods), you accept the call, and now the video is paused on your Mac and your AirPods are already connected to your iPhone.
Any time any of the registered devices needs to emit sound, the AirPods instantly switch to this device (and both devices will show an unobtrusive notification to reverse the auto switch).
And it works every. single. time.
Apple can't make Airdrop work reliably after decades but somehow, they are able to magically and instantly transfer bluetooth audio from a device to another device.
Though, if you use your airpods with anything non apple, it will juste work like a classical bluetooth device, with manual pairing and no magic switching.
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.
I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google
That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful
LLMs are way outside their lane. With that said they've been focused on the underlying components to enable LLMs since way before ChatGPT was on the scene: Unified Memory, Neural Accelerator, even Spotlight counts (as a data source), etc...
There was no world where they were going to be the breakthrough leader in LLM development. That's a problem they can catch up on when they need to or license the technology.
Why should Apple care about LLMs? They missed the boat on cloud, cryptocurrencies and on search engines. So what? It's not their business - they can just license a good offering and move on to what they do best : Products.
my parents live in Russia and my grandma has alzheimer's, so as a present "for her" I bought an airtag - so in case my mom loses grandma in a crowd she can be found.
Little did I know, GPS jammers around the city make my grandma appear 50km away.
AirTag itself doesn't have GPS, of course. It depends on the devices that communicate with the AirTag having precise location. IF you have a phone in Russia, are your maps apps off by 50km these days?
I would assume the inaccuracy is due to the various phones that pick up the airtag pings GPS being jammed, reporting AirTags nowhere near where they actually are.
Makes sense. Would be pretty cool if Apple could find a way to correct GPS jamming using accelerometers and some logic. If your GPS location jump 50 kilometers in 2 minutes, ignore GPS and use cell tower + accelerometer. Maybe create some sort of mesh network, using other phones and nearby SSIDs to get a makeshift location positioning.
That does come with the risk of Tim Cook falling out of a window.
Most current phones already use these techniques (and more) just simply to account for poor signals, which have long been an issue with GPS because signal strength and SNR are inherently very low.
The AirTag does not have a GPS receiver. When anyone's iPhone discovers the tag, it sends their device's location to Apple servers with "by the way, this AirTag is in range." If cellular location is inaccurate then good luck.
Russia does pretty widespread GPS jamming and spoofing both in their country as well as across the Baltics and Nordics (and others). If a phone is receiving bad GPS data when it reports sensing the tag, the tag location will reflect that bad GPS data and not reality.
> Or is it cheapo Android Phones picking up the tag and then sending GPS coords into cloud?
AirTags have no integration with Android devices. There's a shitty app from Apple you can install that allows you to scan for AirTags nearby, one shot. It's supposedly against stalkers, but it's practically useless. There a bunch of other community apps with varying features like finding and notifying you there's an AirTag nearby. But you can't even track your own AirTags from an Android device, because Apple have decided you must do it from an iDevice. No browser, no Android app. You can check your iPhone's location via the browser, but not the AirTag.
The Android ecosystem has an alternative thing, but depending on the phone manufacturer you have to opt in to your device being used to track trackers around you.
When I travel to places with low iPhone market share, I always have one tracker of each ecosystem, just in case.
my runner friends hate it, suddenly your Garmin can't show your pace and distance properly.
(I am very much aware it's a 1st world problem to have in times of war)
Notably they now support both the Apple and Android ecosystems from a single hardware SKU, although only one at a time, and the formerly disposable battery can now be recharged with a standard Qi wireless charger.
I'm interested to hear this. I had very mixed experience a few years ago with the Seinxon finder card; it wasn't reliably in contact to make it beep, even when I was standing right beside it, but worse it would semi-regularly go into anti-stalker mode and start beeping and spamming iPhones around me with scary-looking notices. This second behaviour was obviously a deal-breaker so I discontinued use of them. (Looks like the company still exists but is now selling newer versions of the cards I bought from them)
Having recently switched to Android I was tempted to give Chipolo products a try, but this reddit thread disuaded me, as multiple users there are reporting the exact kinds of issues that I experienced previously: https://www.reddit.com/r/Chipolo/comments/1n4m4j3/chipolo_po...
Nope, but you can play sound. For my wallet it's enough to know I didn't leave it somewhere, then sound is enough. Sorry should have mentioned it's not a perfect replacement.
I'm always tempted to buy one of these but most of them seem to be one time usage, and don't have a way to recharge. That always seems very wasteful to me.
Any recommendations for a rechargable but thin one, AirTag itself is too thick for regular wallets.
I've been using one of these with Find My for over a year. I've not done anything with the Eufy app, just the Find My app itself. It lacks the precision find, but you can play a sound through the Find My app / get directions / share the item / flag the item as lost / do left behind and it works well.
The other direction is just get a wallet that supports a real airtag. Because my wallet is so important to me, the name brand airtag, with UWB-enhanced findability, is worth swapping out my wallet rather than getting a sub-par credit-card find my compatible device. nb, I came to this conclusion after getting an aftermarket credit card device and found it lacking.
Atuvos one at 1.6mm and UGreen one at 1.7mm are great, though one time battery is annoying. There are some that have wireless charging, though thicker.
From the FAQ: Does Tracking Card Air support Precision Finding?
You can track your items from anywhere in the world using the Apple Find My app, but sound alerts only work when you’re within about 150 feet. Since Apple doesn’t yet support Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology for third-party trackers, Tracking Card Air doesn’t include Precision Finding at this time.
They work best for things that a human has to move, and since a good chunk of humans (at least in US/CA) have iPhones, the movement of the physical thing will be tracked by an iPhone fairly reliably. Any time the critter is outside the range of an i-device picking it up the location will be stale. There isn't really a way around that, since GPS/5G radios are a lot more power hungry than the occasional bluetooth pings an airtag broadcasts.
1. they way the network works, it works better for inanimate objects that don't move around
2. they contain small parts that pets might inadvertently eat, and some of the collars that exist for them have been known to snag on things and entrap pets.
I think mostly it's a chew risk for dogs and won't help if the dog is far from the AirTag network. I still have one on my dog anyway (he's not a chewer) and my daughter puts one on her cat occasionally. (Both pets are microchipped too, of course.)
We use them on our cats and have found the trouble-maker cat 3 times out of 3 when needed (in an urban apartment area; most recently the cat was scared by a noise which may have kept her hidden out all night in the cold, unless we had found her/shooed her back to the house)
No. Skeuomorphism would have you dragging the AirTag from a picture of your pocket to a picture of someone else’s pocket, and you’d lose the ability to track it yourself then, because it would belong to the other person now.
Skeuomorphism is more about making the UI work like the real world, not just look like it.
I have ADHD – which is hardly uncommon in this economy – and the improvements to finding AirPods Pro with Find My have been a godsend. I use it almost every day. I've lost so many airpods in the past. I hope we see the same improvements to air tags.
ps, Apple is driving me nuts with their branding. With is AirPods one word and Find My two words?
IIRC, this indicates that it's linked to someone else's account, and has not been shared with you. The "beep when moved" feature is to alert people they're being tracked.
For example, I let my mother in law use luggage of mine with an airtag still in it and every time she moved it after the first day or so, it would play a noise.
I had the thought too, but there is no way anyone else could have gotten physical control over this and shouldn't I see that AirTag when I scan for things in my surrounding as an anti-tracking protection?
does this update also enable precision finding from the watch? would this start working with the previous generation of airtags as well (currently you can use precision finding from your iphone, but not from the watch)
> For the first time, users can use Precision Finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, to find their AirTag, bringing a powerful experience to the wrist.
According the MacRumors, yes but they cant confirm if its only for the new AirTags yet:
"watchOS 26.2.1 is also coming, and it expands Precision Finding to the Apple Watch Series 9 and later, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. We have not yet confirmed if this is for the new AirTag only or also works with the original model."
Is this demonstrably better that just... the devices already in your bag? My backpack would be a primary use case... and in it are my AirPods, iPad, and MacBook Air. I think any of these can use Find My already?
I don’t know how many people have bought them, but I’m going to guess it’s in the millions since Apple are updating it. All those people presumably do find it useful separate from their devices.
Personally I don’t always have an Apple device in my backpack, and when traveling you can’t put devices in checked luggage, so I use them for those use cases at least.
For that one item, no not really. But an AirTag has a battery life of about a year and there's really no reason to frequently remove it. AirPods have a substantially shorter battery life and are not guaranteed to be in that bag all the time no matter what. Also AirTags are many times cheaper and smaller than your listed items and are moderately water and impact resistant. If there's something you want to track in addition to your backpack you likely don't want to buy spare AirPods (your cheapest item) just for that purpose.
The battery life of AirPods in a case (what GP is referring to) is quite long. I don't know how long, but I'd guess weeks/months if you're not using them. Obviously a single AirPod out of the case would last much less time (though still days, IME).
Airtags use Find My as well once you're out of bluetooth range. The tag offers more precision once you get into range, down to inches supposedly whereas Find My is more of a general 30 ft radius
I was really hoping for a new form factor or new killer features. Its too bad that the general public can't behave themselves with simple tech like this
I read they are popular with drug distributors. They ship their merch world wide using various hidden channels and couriers and this helps keep track of the merch.
Sounds like one of those "what if..." things someone made up.
AirTags are terrible for surreptitious tracking, alerting every iOS user nearby of a tracked product following them around.
I mean, years ago people, such as stalkers, would use it for this purpose, but Apple rightly gimped that. There are a lot of specialized, self-connected trackers that creeps and criminals use.
I've only been notified about a device traveling with me one time, and it was when a relative was riding home with me in my car. When we got home, I received a notification that there were AirPods Pro traveling with me.
This is consistent with my understanding that it only goes off if it travels with you for a very long time, or to your house. (Of course, at that point it's too late because they know where you live already.)
And simultaneously gimped the theft-alert use case. I embedded one into my labelmaker, which is a notoriously high-theft item on jobsites. I can still track it in case I leave it behind, which is great.
But if someone steals it, they get an alert that there's an airtag traveling with them, and they can go through their loot to figure out which item it is, and ditch it, or destroy it. In the first case I get my labelmaker back, but I never bust the thief.
Well, to be historically accurate: Apple has pretty much been forced by the backlash to notify people that they're being tracked and even then it only worked if you had an iPhone.
They knew what they were doing and I'm sure the stalking aspect helped their sales significantly as it seems to be a very popular behaviour in the US.
> the stalking aspect helped their sales significantly
while not denying people have done this, I do have problems thinking that it was a significant portion of the sales numbers. exaggerating problems is not necessary and actually reduces the credibility of the people doing the exaggerating
Sure, that's accurate. I actually never said otherwise, nor did I saint Apple. They were basically forced to do it.
Virtually any tracking or surveillance has a knock-on effect that we often overlook in our enthusiasm, but Apple absolutely should have foreseen the abuse that would happen, and certainly profited off of it.
"With its updated internal design, the new AirTag is 50 percent louder than the previous generation, enabling users to hear their AirTag from up to 2x farther than before."
Curious about getting 2x the distance from 1.5x the "loudness", I would have thought the inverse? Maybe there is nuance to this though.
Generally you tag your home as a trusted location, which eliminates most regular pings. Then you make sure that your Find My shows all of your tags; if you missed enrolling one and it still pings as a "stranger's tag" that can be a cause of confusion. (If you live with someone else, I've heard it is useful that you share your Find My data with each other.)
When actually traveling with your stuff there's a personal comfort question of how comfortable you feel in setting things like hotel rooms as "trusted" so you don't get a lot of pings when you leave things behind intentionally in places like hotel rooms. I think that's my biggest ask for AirTags is an easier way to set explicitly time-bound trusts: trust this exact hotel room until my checkout date; trust this exact office space until the end of this work day.
I once bought 4 air tags, never got to work them in any useful sense. I keep getting warnings about leaving my keys behind, which are in my pocket. I don't recall any time being warned about leaving things behind when I did. Can't really locate things a few meters away.
That’s so odd! They’ve worked exactly as promised for me. I never, ever get warnings about my own tags, or my wife’s tags that she’s shared with me. Not even once. And yesterday I used them to find my keys that the cats had relocated to across the house.
I don’t have any explanation for how our experiences could be so different, but they are. Mine even did the cool thing where you can watch your luggage move through an airport until you join up with it.
Apple AirTag is one of those interesting products that you don’t think you need until you use it. An Apple thing that just works as advertised and is cheap enough that you can keep picking them up at Airports, without the guilty feeling that usually comes with buying high-priced Apple products, such as the Polishing Cloth. And when you order it online, the nice engravings are fun for my daughters. They like it when it is pinged, finding their toys and bags, and it is worth the price tag.
I had to put in a few of my daughter’s pencil pouches and some toys; they are cheaper than the AirTags and, financially, make no sense to lose an AirTag that costs more than the items being tracked. But hey, daughter is happy, and that covers up for the cost.
I mean, i remember a lot of posts about people using them for stalking. It's unclear if this has been addressed or if the concern has been deprioritized, or if apple solved the problem somehow.
I mean it was enough of a concern that Android added a "detect airtags" feature to the base android OS.
Apple had its version of "stalking detection" (that equivalent of Android's "detect airtags") from early rollout. (There's a screenshot in the attached article even.) Some of the scrutiny and early complaints was that ecosystem divide that needed Android to also support at least a basic form of that same feature before people would feel safe, and everyone knew that Apple themselves weren't going to build the Android version.
That's great, but could they do something about what plays on the speaker? It's all pretty in that Apple sort of way, but the fact that its volume goes up and down makes it harder to find. Y'know, exactly the one thing you're trying to do with it?
I hate that this eventual e-waste wasn't standardized across vendors. It makes perfect sense for every phone to be a potential node, but the network is bifurcated (and possibly more bifurcations within Android due to Google's privacy-first approach...).
Maybe a hot take, but I don't think this is as awful for e-waste as many other things.
I've had a set of airtags for a good few years now (shortly before Covid, I think?) and they mostly just kinda work. They don't insist upon a need to upgrade, the only part that ever goes bad is the battery -- which is a standard, user-replaceable CR2032, and while batteries going into the garbage isn't fantastic, there's really only so much you can do as long as depend on them.
Like -- this announcement is technically an upgrade, but I've never been less tempted to actually buy into it because the existing product does what it does plenty well enough for my needs.
I do think it's a bit funny to highlight anything Google does now as privacy-first, though. I can't play back Youtube embeds in Waterfox because the browser's default privacy-preserving setting doesn't send referrer information to those embeds, which Youtube now requires for embeds to work. As much as I take issue with Apple's politics over the past year, they do tend to lean towards on-device logic where possible, and their work in the homomorphic cryptography niche has been interesting to follow.
I use the terms interchangeably when it comes to batteries; I do use battery disposal bins, but I don't have any faith that the actual process behind the scenes is much less impactful for the environment.
It's like when I learned that many paper recycling programs end up combining paper with regular garbage, or finding out that plastic recycling is comically ineffective in its outcomes.
Yep. They continue to be excellent pet trackers. “They’re not for use with pets, wink wink”, when if you set out to build a pet tracker from scratch, that’s what you’d hope to end up with.
They're great if you're in a populated area. If you're tracking pets in the country, you'll never see them, as there aren't any relay devices out in the woods.
Pet trackers in which situation though? The times I’ve wanted a tracker on my dog is when we’re out in the woods for a hike and I worry he bolts after an animal or similar. I can’t see how an AirTag would help in that scenario.
That’s a good point. You’re right: they’d be useless there, unless you were so close to your dog that you could hear it anyway. I live in a city and a lost dog would be close to any number of people with phones at any given time, and it’d be very useful there.
That's the part of the "hope" people have with the AirTag is that their pet will happen to wander close to another compatible Apple device to update the tracking. I assume this is also why they are not the "suggested" use
It looks like the anti-stalking mechanism remains the same: if your iPhone detects that a non-paired AirTag is traveling with you you'll get a persistent notification about it.
I've seen these myself for my partner's AirTag when I was carrying her stuff.
There were rumors that this version makes the speaker harder to remove (I remove the speaker from the previous version when I put them in my own cars & motorcycles to make them harder to find). Looking forward to a teardown...
The most stalkable users are android users, but even that it's going away with newer androids. And it already beeps when you move it if it's been away from the owner for too long.
I know because I have an android phone and a not-so-used ipad and mine beep all the time.
Meeting could happen in public, it doesn't mean they know their private address.
For example, meet someone at a convention/fair/job, gift/sell them something which has a hidden tag, and then wait for them to drive to their hotel, or home. Gotcha. With influencer and celebs, you can also send something to their agency, and hope they are re-routed to their home. S** like that happened quite often until people learned to be more careful. Probably still sometimes happens even now.
“Easy” in relative terms for people who hack on electronics. Even if you remove the speaker, modern phones will tell the victim that someone else’s AirTag is moving along with them, unless the owner of the AirTag is also present.
The way Find My has been built, it doesn't really matter what they do with the tags, it's fairly straightforward to build your own tags, or modify tags, that bypass any stalking detection.
A phone's stalking detection just looks for a tag that's not yours that has been around you for a while.
But you can modify a tag such that it selectively powers up, or build a tag that changes identifiers, such that the stalking detection tools don't pick it up.
Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
But also the thief and his accomplice.
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
Thankfully you were in Switzerland rather than the states, I just never see American police caring about that.
Depends on the jurisdiction.
One time I was driving down a twoo-lane road with a police car a few hundred feet behind me. An oncoming pickup truck veered several feet over the center line and almost hit me. I flagged the police down to tell them and they were nonplussed even though they literally saw it happen. Drunk driving, a greater threat than property theft, was of little consequence to them.
On the other side of the country my motorcycle got stolen and the police found it the next day. I picked it up from the tow yard shortly thereafter.
YMMV.
America is weirdly nonplussed by destruction and deaths caused by a car.
Switzerland is the Singapore of Europe (I mean this in a good way!) - the state just functions in a way that other European countries can only dream of
I spent a couple of years in Lausanne so am aware. Swiss police don't mess around, you need to follow the rules if you want to live there.
My car got broken into in Oakland, California. Multiple pieces of luggage stolen (yes, my fault for leaving it in the car in the first place). Luckily I had an AirTag that showed the exact location of the stolen items. I called the police but they said they couldn't do anything. Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in. Regardless, I was put on a waiting list, they finally called me back 3 days later. I promptly left the state a few months later.
>Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in.
I mean, isn't that good? 4th amendment, warrants from a judge, and all that.
Presumably they could easily get a warrant with that information, if they cared to ask.
should have told them the thief was undocumented; they would have been on it in minutes :/
I don’t deal with Oakland Police specifically but Oakland itself is a sanctuary city.
Local police are never supposed to deal with immigration issues anyways, it isn't in their jurisdiction and they would have to call feds in to deal with anything related to it.
Generally, a city is called a sanctuary city if they don't honor hold orders on detainees from customs and immigration, it has nothing to do with police not enforcing immigration rules, which they can't do either way.
The police in Spain will also not care, in my experience. They acted completely helpless regardless of how much information I gave them.
My solution now is to travel very light.
I do use airtags for this purpose. I also expect (and I read) that most police departments won't pay the slightest bit of attention to your reports.
I also know from experience that Zurich police will chase an AirTag location with vigor.
> most police departments won't pay the slightest bit of attention to your reports
Its sort of a combination of two reasons.
First in many cities, police departments are underfunded. And so running around looking for your stolen phone or whatever minor item is low on their to-do list compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shooting their brains out.
Second, for minor thefts most insurance companies just need a quick box-tick "police crime report number" before paying out. So if the police know they can get you off their backs just by quickly giving you a report number, well....
And it's probably under your deductible anyway. And replacing various cards is your deal with your credit card etc. companies. Relatively few of us carry around a lot of cash.
Switzerland sends in swat for noise complaints, they would definitely care about a thief that could be caught.
That's awesome. I'm glad that trackers have reached a price point, reliability and form factors that I can easily put one in everything I care about. I even have card ones in my wallet, my steam deck / e-reader case, etc.
Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.
Given that the battery in my Airtag lasts about a year, I'd rather have to exchange a CR2032 once per year than to buy a new tracker whenever the built-in rechargeable battery inevitably dies. (I think there are actually rechargeable CR2032s too – best of both worlds?)
> The new AirTag is designed with the environment in mind, with 85 percent recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and can be easily recycled.
I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
Building an attachment point into the tag itself is still beyond current technology though. We just don't know how to do it.
The fundamental issue preventing keyring aperture integration stems from the AirTag’s reliance on inverse-phase magnetic reluctance in the structural substrate. You see, the enclosure maintains a precisely calibrated coefficient offramular expansion. Introducing a penetrative void would destabilize the sinusoidal depleneration required for proper UWB phase conjugation. The resulting spurving bearing misalignment could induce up to 40 millidarkness of signal attenuation. Apple’s engineers attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators. Early prototypes with keyring holes exhibited catastrophic unilateral dingle-arm failure within mere minutes of deployment. Until we develop lotus-o-delta-type bearings capable of withstanding the differential girdle spring modulation, I’m afraid keyring integration remains firmly in the realm of theoretical engineering—right up there with perpetual motion machines and TypeScript projects that compile without any // @ts-ignore comments. The technology simply isn’t there yet.
I must say you had me in the first couple sentences :). Also does look like it's not an LLM-generated text either. Good job!
Indeed, LLM's still suck at the cultural nuance required for humor. It's like they're writing for an audience that's too generic, so the joke doesn't truly "land" for anyone in particular.
You really don’t want to accidentally frobnicate the turbo encabulator.
> attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators
Wrote my PhD dissertation on this. It would've been in the literature for Apple's engineers to find, but unfortunately I lost institutional support to get this into a journal after my college (Mailorderdegrees.com, an FTX University^TM) folded mid-process.
You missed the "strategic use of metamaterials to emanate a negative refractive index"
I think the point is to make the smallest unit of functionality possible and then people can integrate that into their use case using attachments, casings, etc. in a way they see fit. It's a good approach for this product in my opinion.
this is the smallest attachment loop i've found. It's rock solid https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CPTS8JG?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...
I use quite a few varieties, including Apple's, and I have found Belkin’s to be an ideal one — small, secure, with a minimal footprint, and available with a keyring or a lanyard.
https://www.belkin.com/p/secure-holder-with-key-ring-for-air...
Dude... not cool to put your Amazon `ref` link in there....
It's not theirs, internal Amazon stuff. Also, plug for Firefox and the Copy Clean Link function.
Yeah &ref= is for analytics, affiliate referrals use &tag=.
But I got my pitchfork out and everything! How dare someone try and make money to pay their bills!
> Building an attachment point into the tag
To be fair, most people I know put their AirTag inside something, e.g. inner pocket of a bag.
At which point the necessity for an attachment point becomes somewhat moot.
Same. I've never seen anyone put an AirTag on a keyring.
Oh, wait...
Different people want different attachment types (or no attachment point at all), so it makes sense for that to be external. I've used other trackers with integrated attachment points, and because the attachment point has to be very compact it tends to be flimsy or hard to fit.. vs the Apple one where you can add a larger attachment point that makes sense to you.
Are you trying to say that the AirTag is so strictly utilitarian, that they couldn’t have found a spot for a lanyard hole?
I disagree, they could have, they didn’t want to. Beyond the look, this sure panders to their accessory partners.
How big of an industry is the phone case? Should it even exist? The audacity.
Right? Nokias had the equivalent of today's "case" built right into the design of the unit, plenty of durable plastic around the vulnerable parts -- the phone would've been considered unfit for sale if it couldn't survive a drop in out-of-the-box condition.
By the time you stripped a dumbphone down to be as vulnerable as one of today's is, it'd be a bare PCB. Nah, probably even in that state, I bet it could handle a drop better than a new iPhone straight out of the box.
What you buy today isn't a complete phone, it's just the guts. One tumble to pavement and you're out a grand. Heaven help you if you fumble it while trying to install the case that should've been part of it from the beginning.
And yet, we still buy them, because the alternatives are from shady manufacturers who never provide updates, and there is no third-party hardware that can run up-to-date iOS. If there was, I'd buy an iNokia in a heartbeat.
Yes, the phone case industry should exist. People want different things. Plenty of people are willing to go without a case entirely. For those who want a case, they want different tradeoffs between bulk and protection. They want different textures. It's OK to sell something that isn't all things to all people.
Somebody take an x-ray so where know where to drill our own holes.
Already been done
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/02/x-rays-show-how-a...
> For the initial disassembly, the AirTag is said to be the hardest to open to access the battery. Though all three could be opened by hand, the AirTag is suggested to be the hardest due to the lack of divots for grip.
Does the author lack thumbs? It’s easy to twist the battery open.
The lack of a divot prevents iFixit from selling an overpriced single use tool that exactly matches the divot shape for $50 USD that just so happens to be the exact same shape and material as a $0.05 guitar pick. Totally unacceptable, won't anyone think of the environment?!?!?!?!
There are third-party tags out there compatible with both Google and Apple's network that is roughly the same size and use the same battery, yet have a giant lanyard opening in the design to fit anything.
Apple could trivially have fit a usable hole if they wanted to. They just don't want to because they get to sell accessories with that now. Also, looking cleaner on its own helps sell even if that is an entirely useless quality for a tag tha tneeds to go into a bloody case.
How does that compare to previous AirTag? Whats the industry baseline for all of those, maybe gold is 100% recycled anyways in most products?
I don't see old-gen airtags for sale on the website. Are they throwing them all out?
Apple rarely offers direct discounts of closeout or excess merchandise. Instead to clear out back stock they’ll work with partner retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, etc.) who don’t mind the brand perception associated with offering deeper discounts.
First-gen AirTags have been on sale on Amazon frequently over the last year, and they’ll probably drop the price again soon.
This is just green washing on the level of “93.65% natural ingredients”.
This is just green washing on the level of “93.65% natural ingredients”.
I keep seeing products in the supermarket with big "Made with REAL ingredients!" labels on them.
As opposed to what? Imaginary ingredients?
Classico pasta sauce is the most recent offender.
Chemicals. That’s what they mean by real ingredients: no chemicals.
Like orange juice: can be from a chemical powder or real oranges.
This is a good example of how easy it is to fool people if they don’t have their own understanding of how things work.
Highlighting this has been a priority in my parenting. My child is having a great time trying to scare friends about the dangers of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in a surprisingly large number of manufactured foods.
Right. And wonder bread is awesome for your health.
But that's total nonsense. Everything in our physical world (including water, air, food, and human bodies) is made of chemicals. They can be naturally occurring or artificially manufactured.
You can nitpick and be pedantic about the wording I used, but if you equate artificial flavors or ingredients with natural ones…
The wholesale material costs for the plastic, gold plating, and magnets is all just pennies, if that.
I'd be a little wary of these numbers as regulation around advertising these kinds of figures normally permits mass balance systems[0] (which imo is tantamount to straight-up lying).
Mass balance is better than nothing I guess, & I understand the practical challenges with going further, but ultimately it's not what's implied by the marketing.
[0] https://www.iscc-system.org/news/mass-balance-explained/
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these things that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it is the only way to have "the environment in mind".
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these thing that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it
I never thought I needed one until my wife lost her car keys, and the Fiat dealer charged $1,200 for a replacement.
And it's not even the electronics that makes them so expensive. Modern car keys aren't like the 1970's where it's just a piece of metal with the edges shaved off. Those little key cutting kiosks at Home Depot can't cope with today's complex engraving.
I have cats. I can’t count on things being where I left them.
but then the fob also costs $30 :/
Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.
> relatively affordable
You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.
They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.
Do they plug into the Find My network that iOS devices use?
Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.
Samsung trackers also use their own network.
Tiles are about the same price as AirTags (at least they were last time I bought some)
Yes
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
I'm not convinced AirPods are that "simple" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB_8dGKh9JI
Or their chargers! https://www.chargerlab.com/apple-18w-usb-c-power-adapter-a16...
Airpods are a great example of good UX making things seem simple. There's a ridiculous amount of engineering that goes into making them work as well as they do.
I can see it in AirTags, but, haven't used AirPods myself, what is so "magical" about them?
Also, my understanding is that AirTags are only usable if you have an iPhone, am I wrong?
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
Maybe I got lucky, but I never had issues with my Bose, Shokz, or even with my Soundcore headphones and bluetooth. I don't use in ear, so I can not comment on that.
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.
I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).
I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.
It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.
Yep but with AirPods, you are listening music or watching a video, on your Mac, your iPhone rings (on your AirPods), you accept the call, and now the video is paused on your Mac and your AirPods are already connected to your iPhone.
Any time any of the registered devices needs to emit sound, the AirPods instantly switch to this device (and both devices will show an unobtrusive notification to reverse the auto switch).
And it works every. single. time.
Apple can't make Airdrop work reliably after decades but somehow, they are able to magically and instantly transfer bluetooth audio from a device to another device.
Though, if you use your airpods with anything non apple, it will juste work like a classical bluetooth device, with manual pairing and no magic switching.
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
AirPods are great! You can use them with an Android, and it will let you know there's AirPods travelling with you every time!
I've used them with my iPad. I don't have a Mac, but I would guess they work with any Find My-capable machine.
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
I would not call that usable.
How are Airtags or Airpods simple?
Cramming lots of tech into a small footprint is an extremely complex affair.
Simple user experience.
Apple is a big company. I’d be more surprised if they were completely consistent.
I've started to dislike the narrative that "Apple never leads the pack, but it waits to release the best product."
But that hasn't been true for a decade. Most improvements have been marginal, and they totally missed the boat on LLMs.
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.
I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google
That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful
LLMs are way outside their lane. With that said they've been focused on the underlying components to enable LLMs since way before ChatGPT was on the scene: Unified Memory, Neural Accelerator, even Spotlight counts (as a data source), etc...
There was no world where they were going to be the breakthrough leader in LLM development. That's a problem they can catch up on when they need to or license the technology.
Why should Apple care about LLMs? They missed the boat on cloud, cryptocurrencies and on search engines. So what? It's not their business - they can just license a good offering and move on to what they do best : Products.
my parents live in Russia and my grandma has alzheimer's, so as a present "for her" I bought an airtag - so in case my mom loses grandma in a crowd she can be found.
Little did I know, GPS jammers around the city make my grandma appear 50km away.
Not Apple's fault of course.
AirTag itself doesn't have GPS, of course. It depends on the devices that communicate with the AirTag having precise location. IF you have a phone in Russia, are your maps apps off by 50km these days?
I would assume the inaccuracy is due to the various phones that pick up the airtag pings GPS being jammed, reporting AirTags nowhere near where they actually are.
Makes sense. Would be pretty cool if Apple could find a way to correct GPS jamming using accelerometers and some logic. If your GPS location jump 50 kilometers in 2 minutes, ignore GPS and use cell tower + accelerometer. Maybe create some sort of mesh network, using other phones and nearby SSIDs to get a makeshift location positioning.
That does come with the risk of Tim Cook falling out of a window.
Most current phones already use these techniques (and more) just simply to account for poor signals, which have long been an issue with GPS because signal strength and SNR are inherently very low.
The AirTag does not have a GPS receiver. When anyone's iPhone discovers the tag, it sends their device's location to Apple servers with "by the way, this AirTag is in range." If cellular location is inaccurate then good luck.
Wait what
Russia does pretty widespread GPS jamming and spoofing both in their country as well as across the Baltics and Nordics (and others). If a phone is receiving bad GPS data when it reports sensing the tag, the tag location will reflect that bad GPS data and not reality.
Shouldn't most comodity GPS receivers also be GLONASS compatible (I get that Galileo is more niche and might not be included).
Does the Sensor Apple uses not use GLONASS in Russia? Or is it cheapo Android Phones picking up the tag and then sending GPS coords into cloud?
edit: Nvm, I might be dumb, I guess unless your jamming includes all commodity GNSS it's pretty useless.
They have had GLONASS for ages too, but obviously they have to jam everything, otherwise it's not going to prevent drones and such from working
> Or is it cheapo Android Phones picking up the tag and then sending GPS coords into cloud?
AirTags have no integration with Android devices. There's a shitty app from Apple you can install that allows you to scan for AirTags nearby, one shot. It's supposedly against stalkers, but it's practically useless. There a bunch of other community apps with varying features like finding and notifying you there's an AirTag nearby. But you can't even track your own AirTags from an Android device, because Apple have decided you must do it from an iDevice. No browser, no Android app. You can check your iPhone's location via the browser, but not the AirTag.
The Android ecosystem has an alternative thing, but depending on the phone manufacturer you have to opt in to your device being used to track trackers around you.
When I travel to places with low iPhone market share, I always have one tracker of each ecosystem, just in case.
Oh, thank for the correction. I must've muddled it up in my mind with the contact tracing integration that had during Covid.
Thanks for explanation. I had absolutely no awareness GPS jamming was a thing, let alone at scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasukha
my runner friends hate it, suddenly your Garmin can't show your pace and distance properly. (I am very much aware it's a 1st world problem to have in times of war)
Great to hear but it's still the same shape. I really want a 'credit card' shaped version I can slide into my wallet.
I bought a third party one to do just that, and it's worked fine for me: https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-card-spot
I think there are other options too
There's a newer version: https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-card
Notably they now support both the Apple and Android ecosystems from a single hardware SKU, although only one at a time, and the formerly disposable battery can now be recharged with a standard Qi wireless charger.
I'm interested to hear this. I had very mixed experience a few years ago with the Seinxon finder card; it wasn't reliably in contact to make it beep, even when I was standing right beside it, but worse it would semi-regularly go into anti-stalker mode and start beeping and spamming iPhones around me with scary-looking notices. This second behaviour was obviously a deal-breaker so I discontinued use of them. (Looks like the company still exists but is now selling newer versions of the cards I bought from them)
Having recently switched to Android I was tempted to give Chipolo products a try, but this reddit thread disuaded me, as multiple users there are reporting the exact kinds of issues that I experienced previously: https://www.reddit.com/r/Chipolo/comments/1n4m4j3/chipolo_po...
Does it tell a thief a chipolo is following them around like the apple tag?
Do the third party ones have UWB/"Precision Finding"?
Nope, but you can play sound. For my wallet it's enough to know I didn't leave it somewhere, then sound is enough. Sorry should have mentioned it's not a perfect replacement.
Yeah. Although I'm normally pretty good, it's mostly what did I leave my wallet under in my house?
You can buy a third party wallet card that works with the Find My network just like an AirTag.
I'm always tempted to buy one of these but most of them seem to be one time usage, and don't have a way to recharge. That always seems very wasteful to me.
Any recommendations for a rechargable but thin one, AirTag itself is too thick for regular wallets.
https://www.eufy.com/uk/products/t87b1011?variant=4875830860...
I've been using one of these with Find My for over a year. I've not done anything with the Eufy app, just the Find My app itself. It lacks the precision find, but you can play a sound through the Find My app / get directions / share the item / flag the item as lost / do left behind and it works well.
I have one you can recharge wirelessly. Forget the brand but it’s been working well
The Eufy SmartTrack card is great! Mine is non-rechargeable and going on year 3. They have released a rechargeable version called the “E30”.
The other direction is just get a wallet that supports a real airtag. Because my wallet is so important to me, the name brand airtag, with UWB-enhanced findability, is worth swapping out my wallet rather than getting a sub-par credit-card find my compatible device. nb, I came to this conclusion after getting an aftermarket credit card device and found it lacking.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZ8C5N7H
I could be wrong but third party tags bet a subset of the tracking capabilities? Ie less accurate/less likely to be found.
I haven't stress tested it but I have a Spotfinder in my small wallet.
Atuvos one at 1.6mm and UGreen one at 1.7mm are great, though one time battery is annoying. There are some that have wireless charging, though thicker.
SpotMinder is supposedly wireless charging though haven't tried.
Have one in my wallet. Will probably get some more AirTags.
airtag compatible, shows up in Find My: https://nomadgoods.com/products/tracking-card
Do these have the ultra wide band chip? you lose a lot of utility without it.
From the FAQ: Does Tracking Card Air support Precision Finding? You can track your items from anywhere in the world using the Apple Find My app, but sound alerts only work when you’re within about 150 feet. Since Apple doesn’t yet support Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology for third-party trackers, Tracking Card Air doesn’t include Precision Finding at this time.
I like that it's the same shape. My backbag has an AirTag pocket, so I can just swap out a first-gen AirTag for a second-gen if I need to.
I think there are also several third-party wallet trackers that integrate with the Find My network.
I get the optics about tracking people...
But man that's one of my best use cases, toss a tag in my kid's pocket when we are somewhere busy. I used one on my older in-law who tended to wander.
They work great for that.
> Designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets, the new AirTag incorporates…
Interesting to call out that it’s not designed for pets. I know several people with AirTags on their pet collars.
Legal reason, perhaps?
Apple doesn't, maybe, want to explain why these are for tracking the living?
why not pets?
They work best for things that a human has to move, and since a good chunk of humans (at least in US/CA) have iPhones, the movement of the physical thing will be tracked by an iPhone fairly reliably. Any time the critter is outside the range of an i-device picking it up the location will be stale. There isn't really a way around that, since GPS/5G radios are a lot more power hungry than the occasional bluetooth pings an airtag broadcasts.
1. they way the network works, it works better for inanimate objects that don't move around
2. they contain small parts that pets might inadvertently eat, and some of the collars that exist for them have been known to snag on things and entrap pets.
I think mostly it's a chew risk for dogs and won't help if the dog is far from the AirTag network. I still have one on my dog anyway (he's not a chewer) and my daughter puts one on her cat occasionally. (Both pets are microchipped too, of course.)
I bought one for my cat, never did help with finding him, just the general area.
They're not great for tracking things that move on their own, or things that avoid people.
We use them on our cats and have found the trouble-maker cat 3 times out of 3 when needed (in an urban apartment area; most recently the cat was scared by a noise which may have kept her hidden out all night in the cold, unless we had found her/shooed her back to the house)
Is this… skeuomorphism in an Apple UI? In 2026?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/01/apple-introduc...
No. Skeuomorphism would have you dragging the AirTag from a picture of your pocket to a picture of someone else’s pocket, and you’d lose the ability to track it yourself then, because it would belong to the other person now.
Skeuomorphism is more about making the UI work like the real world, not just look like it.
I have ADHD – which is hardly uncommon in this economy – and the improvements to finding AirPods Pro with Find My have been a godsend. I use it almost every day. I've lost so many airpods in the past. I hope we see the same improvements to air tags.
ps, Apple is driving me nuts with their branding. With is AirPods one word and Find My two words?
I have an older AirTag, which cannot be seen by my iPhone any more but gives a slight beep whenever it gets shaken. Anyone ever heard of the behavior?
IIRC, this indicates that it's linked to someone else's account, and has not been shared with you. The "beep when moved" feature is to alert people they're being tracked.
For example, I let my mother in law use luggage of mine with an airtag still in it and every time she moved it after the first day or so, it would play a noise.
I had the thought too, but there is no way anyone else could have gotten physical control over this and shouldn't I see that AirTag when I scan for things in my surrounding as an anti-tracking protection?
The battery needs changed.
Changing the battery was the first thing I did. No change. But if that is the official signal for "battery low", I can try a few more. Thanks.
Make sure the battery doesn’t have bitterant coating on the edge where it meets the AirTag contact.
The first time I replaced my AirTag batteries I had to remove some of the coating or it wouldn’t power the AirTag.
Thats worth a try, because if the batteries have that, trying several ones of the same brand would produce the same results.
Now, do I try to test this by licking the battery or should I try to sand the surface without pre-testing? :)
does this update also enable precision finding from the watch? would this start working with the previous generation of airtags as well (currently you can use precision finding from your iphone, but not from the watch)
From the linked article:
> For the first time, users can use Precision Finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, to find their AirTag, bringing a powerful experience to the wrist.
According the MacRumors, yes but they cant confirm if its only for the new AirTags yet:
"watchOS 26.2.1 is also coming, and it expands Precision Finding to the Apple Watch Series 9 and later, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. We have not yet confirmed if this is for the new AirTag only or also works with the original model."
Is this demonstrably better that just... the devices already in your bag? My backpack would be a primary use case... and in it are my AirPods, iPad, and MacBook Air. I think any of these can use Find My already?
Maybe not if one of those items is always in your backpack. A few other use cases that I think they're great for:
- Throw one in your checked bag when traveling
- Mount one in a relatively concealed location on your bike
- Keychain (depending on if you're prone to misplacing your keys)
In addition to your first use case, multiple airlines are now supporting AirTag for bag tracking.
I don’t know how many people have bought them, but I’m going to guess it’s in the millions since Apple are updating it. All those people presumably do find it useful separate from their devices.
Personally I don’t always have an Apple device in my backpack, and when traveling you can’t put devices in checked luggage, so I use them for those use cases at least.
For that one item, no not really. But an AirTag has a battery life of about a year and there's really no reason to frequently remove it. AirPods have a substantially shorter battery life and are not guaranteed to be in that bag all the time no matter what. Also AirTags are many times cheaper and smaller than your listed items and are moderately water and impact resistant. If there's something you want to track in addition to your backpack you likely don't want to buy spare AirPods (your cheapest item) just for that purpose.
The battery life of AirPods in a case (what GP is referring to) is quite long. I don't know how long, but I'd guess weeks/months if you're not using them. Obviously a single AirPod out of the case would last much less time (though still days, IME).
Airtags use Find My as well once you're out of bluetooth range. The tag offers more precision once you get into range, down to inches supposedly whereas Find My is more of a general 30 ft radius
I use AirTags on car keys and wallets.
I have them on my dogs' collars, because squirrels exist.
Cats collars here, as an insurance measure if they were ever to sneak outside. They're also handy to locate them around the house for various reasons.
They might not be for you.
I was really hoping for a new form factor or new killer features. Its too bad that the general public can't behave themselves with simple tech like this
I read they are popular with drug distributors. They ship their merch world wide using various hidden channels and couriers and this helps keep track of the merch.
I put one in my car when I shipped it across the country - it was great to be able to check where it was and know when it was getting close!
Sounds like one of those "what if..." things someone made up.
AirTags are terrible for surreptitious tracking, alerting every iOS user nearby of a tracked product following them around.
I mean, years ago people, such as stalkers, would use it for this purpose, but Apple rightly gimped that. There are a lot of specialized, self-connected trackers that creeps and criminals use.
I've only been notified about a device traveling with me one time, and it was when a relative was riding home with me in my car. When we got home, I received a notification that there were AirPods Pro traveling with me.
This is consistent with my understanding that it only goes off if it travels with you for a very long time, or to your house. (Of course, at that point it's too late because they know where you live already.)
And simultaneously gimped the theft-alert use case. I embedded one into my labelmaker, which is a notoriously high-theft item on jobsites. I can still track it in case I leave it behind, which is great.
But if someone steals it, they get an alert that there's an airtag traveling with them, and they can go through their loot to figure out which item it is, and ditch it, or destroy it. In the first case I get my labelmaker back, but I never bust the thief.
Well, to be historically accurate: Apple has pretty much been forced by the backlash to notify people that they're being tracked and even then it only worked if you had an iPhone.
They knew what they were doing and I'm sure the stalking aspect helped their sales significantly as it seems to be a very popular behaviour in the US.
> the stalking aspect helped their sales significantly
while not denying people have done this, I do have problems thinking that it was a significant portion of the sales numbers. exaggerating problems is not necessary and actually reduces the credibility of the people doing the exaggerating
Sure, that's accurate. I actually never said otherwise, nor did I saint Apple. They were basically forced to do it.
Virtually any tracking or surveillance has a knock-on effect that we often overlook in our enthusiasm, but Apple absolutely should have foreseen the abuse that would happen, and certainly profited off of it.
I read this literally just after I ordered 4 AirTags. Great.
You have 14 days to return them.
Not all retailers take returns. But the old ones were likely on sale, have been for a while.
He should have bought them directly from Apple then.
not in all countries
"With its updated internal design, the new AirTag is 50 percent louder than the previous generation, enabling users to hear their AirTag from up to 2x farther than before."
Curious about getting 2x the distance from 1.5x the "loudness", I would have thought the inverse? Maybe there is nuance to this though.
loudness is logarithmic
I tried AirTags once. It beeped non stop on my own possessions. I don’t understand how anyone uses these things.
Generally you tag your home as a trusted location, which eliminates most regular pings. Then you make sure that your Find My shows all of your tags; if you missed enrolling one and it still pings as a "stranger's tag" that can be a cause of confusion. (If you live with someone else, I've heard it is useful that you share your Find My data with each other.)
When actually traveling with your stuff there's a personal comfort question of how comfortable you feel in setting things like hotel rooms as "trusted" so you don't get a lot of pings when you leave things behind intentionally in places like hotel rooms. I think that's my biggest ask for AirTags is an easier way to set explicitly time-bound trusts: trust this exact hotel room until my checkout date; trust this exact office space until the end of this work day.
That’s not the expected experience, and not the one other people have.
I once bought 4 air tags, never got to work them in any useful sense. I keep getting warnings about leaving my keys behind, which are in my pocket. I don't recall any time being warned about leaving things behind when I did. Can't really locate things a few meters away.
That’s so odd! They’ve worked exactly as promised for me. I never, ever get warnings about my own tags, or my wife’s tags that she’s shared with me. Not even once. And yesterday I used them to find my keys that the cats had relocated to across the house.
I don’t have any explanation for how our experiences could be so different, but they are. Mine even did the cool thing where you can watch your luggage move through an airport until you join up with it.
Just found out that the one active remaining tag on my keychain stopped working in September without me noticing.
Apple AirTag is one of those interesting products that you don’t think you need until you use it. An Apple thing that just works as advertised and is cheap enough that you can keep picking them up at Airports, without the guilty feeling that usually comes with buying high-priced Apple products, such as the Polishing Cloth. And when you order it online, the nice engravings are fun for my daughters. They like it when it is pinged, finding their toys and bags, and it is worth the price tag.
I had to put in a few of my daughter’s pencil pouches and some toys; they are cheaper than the AirTags and, financially, make no sense to lose an AirTag that costs more than the items being tracked. But hey, daughter is happy, and that covers up for the cost.
There's a value in sentimentality that doesn't always reflect in the financial value of a thing.
The greatest success of AirTags is its silent refutation of the clamoring concern trolling.
It's been, what, six years now? The media would pay hand over fist for an airtags stalking story and how many have there actually been?
I mean, i remember a lot of posts about people using them for stalking. It's unclear if this has been addressed or if the concern has been deprioritized, or if apple solved the problem somehow.
I mean it was enough of a concern that Android added a "detect airtags" feature to the base android OS.
Apple had its version of "stalking detection" (that equivalent of Android's "detect airtags") from early rollout. (There's a screenshot in the attached article even.) Some of the scrutiny and early complaints was that ecosystem divide that needed Android to also support at least a basic form of that same feature before people would feel safe, and everyone knew that Apple themselves weren't going to build the Android version.
You mean how many where perp was caught?
AirTag (and FindMy for devices like phones, tablets, etc.) might be my favorite iOS/Apple feature and one that I use regularly.
The new AirTag requires a compatible iPhone with iOS 26 or later, or iPad with iPadOS 26 or later.
Oh come the fuck ON. I'm not installing your silly fuzzy UI, Apple. Get over it.
For real. This just went from insta-purchase to "guess I'll have one someday, but not anytime soon".
I use these to help keep track of my kids, but I'll probably get them AWs before I upgrade to 26 in all honesty.
The AirTag is a fantastic device.
If only it were usable with an Android phone :(
> and a louder speaker
That's great, but could they do something about what plays on the speaker? It's all pretty in that Apple sort of way, but the fact that its volume goes up and down makes it harder to find. Y'know, exactly the one thing you're trying to do with it?
I hate that this eventual e-waste wasn't standardized across vendors. It makes perfect sense for every phone to be a potential node, but the network is bifurcated (and possibly more bifurcations within Android due to Google's privacy-first approach...).
Maybe a hot take, but I don't think this is as awful for e-waste as many other things.
I've had a set of airtags for a good few years now (shortly before Covid, I think?) and they mostly just kinda work. They don't insist upon a need to upgrade, the only part that ever goes bad is the battery -- which is a standard, user-replaceable CR2032, and while batteries going into the garbage isn't fantastic, there's really only so much you can do as long as depend on them.
Like -- this announcement is technically an upgrade, but I've never been less tempted to actually buy into it because the existing product does what it does plenty well enough for my needs.
I do think it's a bit funny to highlight anything Google does now as privacy-first, though. I can't play back Youtube embeds in Waterfox because the browser's default privacy-preserving setting doesn't send referrer information to those embeds, which Youtube now requires for embeds to work. As much as I take issue with Apple's politics over the past year, they do tend to lean towards on-device logic where possible, and their work in the homomorphic cryptography niche has been interesting to follow.
Please don't put your CR2032 in the garbage. Use battery disposal points for that.
I use the terms interchangeably when it comes to batteries; I do use battery disposal bins, but I don't have any faith that the actual process behind the scenes is much less impactful for the environment.
It's like when I learned that many paper recycling programs end up combining paper with regular garbage, or finding out that plastic recycling is comically ineffective in its outcomes.
But the real question is... is the speaker still glued on?
Is this just to lock out the cheap clones?
Great that they are improving a relatively low profile product. I imagine that the warning of using AirTag on pets is just for regulatory purposes?
Yep. They continue to be excellent pet trackers. “They’re not for use with pets, wink wink”, when if you set out to build a pet tracker from scratch, that’s what you’d hope to end up with.
They're great if you're in a populated area. If you're tracking pets in the country, you'll never see them, as there aren't any relay devices out in the woods.
Pet trackers in which situation though? The times I’ve wanted a tracker on my dog is when we’re out in the woods for a hike and I worry he bolts after an animal or similar. I can’t see how an AirTag would help in that scenario.
That’s a good point. You’re right: they’d be useless there, unless you were so close to your dog that you could hear it anyway. I live in a city and a lost dog would be close to any number of people with phones at any given time, and it’d be very useful there.
That's the part of the "hope" people have with the AirTag is that their pet will happen to wander close to another compatible Apple device to update the tracking. I assume this is also why they are not the "suggested" use
And they didn't put a small loop in it so you can attach one of those skinny little lanyard hoops?!
Attaching these things to anything is their major flaw.
/picard facepalm
How else can they make you buy a keychain holder that costs more than the AirTag itself?
I was hoping for 6DoF sub-mm realtime tracking. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Would be great, but that, world-wide, for millions of objects, probably is a case of putting your expectations too high.
Has that ever been demonstrated for a single object, even if allowing the object to be a thousand times as large as this?
why do you need that?
That took a long time. Better late than never.
Late? When did Apple originally announce that it would be released?
Are they less prone to stalking? All I see is generic corpo "industry security" verbiage
It looks like the anti-stalking mechanism remains the same: if your iPhone detects that a non-paired AirTag is traveling with you you'll get a persistent notification about it.
I've seen these myself for my partner's AirTag when I was carrying her stuff.
Apparently Android 6+ can warn you about AirTags in the same way, since May 2024: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-and-google-deli...
There were rumors that this version makes the speaker harder to remove (I remove the speaker from the previous version when I put them in my own cars & motorcycles to make them harder to find). Looking forward to a teardown...
The most stalkable users are android users, but even that it's going away with newer androids. And it already beeps when you move it if it's been away from the owner for too long.
I know because I have an android phone and a not-so-used ipad and mine beep all the time.
What stalking scenario are you worried with?
Have you not seen the stories? Put one of these on the underside of an ex's car
How does that avoid the Android/iPhone unknown AirTag warning features?
And it would notify your ex that you did so, no?
Apple has already done more than enough to discourage stalking. We shouldn’t nerf all our technology to the ground because assholes exist.
It's too late when they are notified. The last known address is where the victim is at.
The perpetrator has to already find the victim, and physically be there, to put the tag on the car
Meeting could happen in public, it doesn't mean they know their private address.
For example, meet someone at a convention/fair/job, gift/sell them something which has a hidden tag, and then wait for them to drive to their hotel, or home. Gotcha. With influencer and celebs, you can also send something to their agency, and hope they are re-routed to their home. S** like that happened quite often until people learned to be more careful. Probably still sometimes happens even now.
Isn't it easy to disable the speaker?
“Easy” in relative terms for people who hack on electronics. Even if you remove the speaker, modern phones will tell the victim that someone else’s AirTag is moving along with them, unless the owner of the AirTag is also present.
The way Find My has been built, it doesn't really matter what they do with the tags, it's fairly straightforward to build your own tags, or modify tags, that bypass any stalking detection.
A phone's stalking detection just looks for a tag that's not yours that has been around you for a while.
But you can modify a tag such that it selectively powers up, or build a tag that changes identifiers, such that the stalking detection tools don't pick it up.
I've written a bit about this here: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/further-thoughts-on-stealth-ai... https://www.hotelexistence.ca/exploring-bluetooth-trackers-a...