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.
I need to applaud the efficiency and moxie of the Zurich / Swiss police service.
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
In certain places in America. My county sheriff's office would be more than happy to have something to do that isn't picking up somebody's stray dog. I'm sure this is true for the UK and Canada too.
That's not a common occurrence, police in Switzerland is highly passive, and the judiciary system is highly complicit with criminals (drug dealers,thieves, white collar crimes etc), and against women (rape victims can be told to close their legs better by judges).
Saying "i am getting my gun and going to retrieve my stuff" guarantees that 6-8 police cars will converge on the location within minutes. Once there, they will apprehend the thief since they are there already.
My friend/colleague had her phone stolen while she was napping in the hospital room of her terminally ill husband. Fortunately it had MDM. Called Palo Alto PD, I sat with them and tracked it from the hotel and it was already in San Jose. They worked with SJPD live and walked them into the guy who happened to be in a parking garage peering into cars. Caught him with a backpack full of stolen phones.
The stereotype of US cops not caring isn't always true.
Unfortunate fact for the perp was the ill husband was a US Attorney and stealing his phone made it a big boy federal felony that was not looked kindly upon by the colleagues of a dying AUSA in the Northern District. I wonder if he's still in FCI Lompoc.
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
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.
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.
Unrelated to airtags but last year a couple wheels were stolen off my brand new car. My city in California falls under county sheriff jurisdiction and they actually assigned a detective to the case.
Sadly even once he got the subpoena and other paperwork to track down the criminals through Facebook (they had listed my wheels two weeks later on Marketplace) he couldn't find them since they were using VPNs.
Same story in Bulgaria. A backpack with an iPhone and an iPad was stolen from a car. Had to go to the police department to file a written complaint. Weeks after that the devices were still visible in FindMy but police could not identify and catch the thieves.
So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)
The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.
Funny story: I actually forgot my backpack in the train at Zurich HB and it went to Basel and back again to Zurich HB, where I was able to get from the train.
All the while I was nervously looking at Find My, seeing it travel and just hoping it wouldn’t be stolen.
Reminds me of a Big Lebowski scene. That is surprising because it is an easy win for them. They would be all after it.
I have recollection of french police using civilian appearance to collect a bike thief in a meetup between him and the bike's original owner presenting himself as a buyer.
> 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....
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?)
> 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.
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
When I lived in London, I once came across a criminal operation that was producing fake documents, in what looked like substantial quantities. British & foreign driving licences, National Insurance cards, passports, ID cards etc. Not especially high-quality, but still.
Try as I might, I could not get the Metropolitain Police interested. From Royal Mail tracking numbers, I was able to figure out which post office the docs were being sent from. I took a pile of those fake docs to a large police station literally across the street from the post office. Got a crime reference number and was told to keep the docs. :)
In Zürich, I once came off my bicycle. No one else involved, no damage to anything except myself. The police were on the scene six minutes later (they responded when a helpful passer-by called for an ambulance). Offered to take my bicycle for safekeeping while I was in hospital, which was jolly nice of them. :)
I had a camera stolen on a Zürich streetcar and when I reported it to the police they acted like it was the first crime that had ever been reported in the canton, a very serious matter indeed.
yeah this should be the standard, same here in Australia unfortunately the police will just pretend to care by taking more information and then does nothing.
> 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.
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.
And the result is that for every oh-so-sustainable AirTag sold, a keyring doohickey is dieseled/kerosened from AliExpress' China warehouse to the consumer.
You're getting a ton of jokey replies, in true internet fashion, but the real answer is acoustics. For it to sound as loud as it can with no visible speaker grille, it needs to be that shape with no keyring holes.
My father-in-law is a builder. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he is lost in wonder. We were in an Apple Store together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build an attachment point to the tag itself. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it'
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.
Recycled metals have always been cost effective. Recycled plastic is much more expensive than virgin plastic, but it's a very small materials cost to start with, likely totaling only a few cents.
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.
What level of materials recycling would be required for you to not consider it green washing?
It’s a genuine question, since I don’t like Apple and agree that we buy tons of stuff we don’t really need. That said, our bicycles can’t be insured anymore, but having AirTags at least alleviates some of the angst over leaving them in public places.
It’s never possible for things to be good with people like you. It’s not 100% recycled, which would be better. But surely, this is better than 0% recycled??
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".
This feels like a good tradeoff as far as gadgets go. It doesn’t take finding that many objects for it to make up the energy cost to manufacture the AirTag.
They do require periodic battery replacements but I imagine it’s still a net savings or pretty negligible cost. I’d love to see a more formal analysis, though.
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.
Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention. You have less than an hour to retrieve your item before the tag alerts the thief they are being tracked. I've seen it trigger as quickly as 30 minutes.
To me, the bigger problem is the lack of ability for Android phones to register an AirTag as recognized. They've never done anything to address the problem of "drive your wife's car and her AirTag is beeping at you and your Android phone is beeping at you and there's no way to tell either one to stop".
As the owner of many airtags and some Airpods who has switched to Android, this is infuriating. I get beeps and unknown tracker notifications multiple times a day.
There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.
I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
I developed a device that turns an Airtag on and off at specific intervals (roughly 80% off 20% on). While the AirTag is off, it can’t be detected, and when it turns on again, you can locate it and with it your stolen item: https://undetectag.com
I'm about to order the new version to check whether it works on it too
I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.
So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.
In addition to this, AirTag also makes a sound when on the move.
This is also quite ridiculous, as it literally gives away that there is an AirTag there. I have seen people removing the speaker to eliminate this flaw.
How useful is a GPS position for theft prevention? IME cops are not interested in doing more than filing a report after a theft, even if you have a live GPS location of the item for them. Do you try and go get it yourself?
GPS won't prevent theft, but can help in recovery. Can.
But Apple does more stuff as well, like encrypting your phone and making it so even harvesting a stolen phone for parts is unattractive (everything has serial numbers and you can't just swap a part out).
i can speak to this as i had my motorcycle stolen on NYE last year in Santa Monica with an airtag in it. the Santa Monica police said “smart, but it’s in LA so we can’t help you get it. tell the LAPD.”. it took me seven hours of calls to the LAPD while personally hunting down my bike in the shadiest areas of LA, and being a block away from getting it myself, did they come. so yes, if you’re in LA, you basically get it yourself.
in my case, the damage was so much i wish i had just left it stolen and taken the bigger insurance payout.
Setting expectations and thinning the herd. If even half of items had a well hidden air tag, and the cops successfully followed up even half of tagged thefts:
There would a. be less dumb criminals around to repeat offend and b. The smarter would-be criminals will do the calculus and and not steal items which could have tags.
I have only seen the Google side, just a single time when one of my Chipolos threw an alert on my passenger's Samsung.
My Chipolo certainly still works.
There are [cheap] tags being sold that are compatible with both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub. I would rather have a dual-network device than Apple's improved model.
Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
It sends alerts to the thief's iPhone or Android (if you have Apple's Tracker Detect Android app) that they are being tracked within 30 to 60 minutes. It also enables the beeping so the thief can find and remove the Airtag.
If the Airtag can't reach the thief's phone, it starts chirping by itself within an 8-24 hour window.
It sounds like the external dimensions are going to be exactly the same or nearly so. I'm hoping the battery compartment is also identical so that third-party mounting and extended battery packs continue to work.
I recently picked up a few of these extended battery packs and it would be nice to eventually upgrade the AirTag if the extended range turns out to be meaningful. They're pretty neat, you remove the battery cover completely and only insert the half of the AirTag with the electronics and radio.
Their description does say “Works with AirTag generation 1 & 2.”
Thanks for putting me on to these. Really clever products. I always feel stupid with my airtag dangling off of my camera.
There are none from Apple but in the past I have used Chipolos. They have some which are the size of about 3 stacked credit cards and fit in my wallet easily. The (at that time) did not feature UWB tracking but had a decent loudspeaker. Unfortunately they are single-use only and once the battery ran out (happened to me after about a year) you had to throw it away...
Yeah, I picked them up along with some AA lithium (non-rechargeable) batteries. I also didn't know those batteries existed until recently. I knew there were rechargeable lithium AAs with a charge plug and charging circuitry built into each little cylinder, but I've heard mostly bad reviews of those.
These non-rechargeable ones have pretty good reviews though, and apparently last much longer than normal AAs (both in terms of capacity and storage). I'll probably start putting them in the handful of things I've got that still take AAs.
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.
Stupid form factor, though. Need to buy extra accessories to be able to actually mount it to anything, but I guess that's the Apple way. Why not have a hole to put a rope or anything through?
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.
I have a third-party tracker and the AirTag in my bicycle. The third-party tracker has no clue what it’s doing or meant to do. But then again, the AirTag is completely inaudible in a decently-sized bicycle parking garage.
i thought so too, but in practice i've been getting much better battery life from the official airtag on my keychain, than i do from the "atuvos" trackers that see much less use. high-precision UWB finding and half as many coin cells used makes the airtag an easy choice over the cheaper trackers for me.
the card-shaped one i've got in my wallet isn't going to be replaced by an official airtag any time soon though, that form factor is too nice.
The reliability of the other brands are quite poor though. I've tried Tile, I've tried Pebble (using Google's network) and neither has worked reliability enough. So I ended up switching to AirTags and so far I have been impressed with the reliability - it works 100% of the time which is not something I could say about Tile nor Pebble/Google.
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 sporting a Life360, MoniMoto and AirTags on my moto. The Life360 seemed to have better range—until it just went offline. The AirTag is still working, though.
So I’m stoked to hear about a new tag with greater range.
What airtags need is a theft mode, where anyone carrying the airtag is not alerted, but the location can be retrieved by an approved local authority after being voluntarily surrendered by the owner.
Whitelisting law enforcement so when the owner of the air tag declares it stolen nobody other than a whitelisted law enforcement org could view its location and when they did that creates an audit log?
It would be nice if this could tie in to actively altering enforcement when it's turned on, maybe even require sharing with authorities for it to be enabled: the stalker would have to collaborate with police in order to stalk the victim.
I'm curious whether the improved range is actually going to make the product worse for my particular use case, which is being alerted when I've left my bag somewhere (this has happened to me at least 5 times over the years). My understanding is that the item left behind notifications are triggered when your phone loses contact with the AirTag, so increased range can potentially take me from being notified as I step off the train to being notified as I leave the station and the train has departed.
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.
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.
I wish they made airtags in different form factors.
I've gotten into photography lately. I'd love to slip an airtag into more places - ideally within the housing of my camera bodies themselves. But, there's not really any room to put an airtag on or in a camera given the current airtag form factor.
You can get camera cages with secret compartments for airtags. And lens caps which take an airtag. But they take up a lot of space, and end up adding a lot of bulk to the camera itself. I wish Apple opened airtags up to 3rd party manufacturers who could buy the (tiny) circuit board directly, so they could hide it in their products better.
The better solution is the route that Insta360 took with the Go Ultra. The camera has embedded "Find My" technology. No Airtag or hiding things required, the entire camera is the tag.
All we need to do is get more camera companies to follow suit.
So they made it impossible to remove speaker, destroying its usability as a theft tracking device. One could add an airtag with a removed speaker on a bike/scooter/car and then localize it in case of theft. With the new airtag any thief will be quickly notified they are tracked.
We have an airtag in our cargo bike, connected to our ipad (neither my wife nor I have an Iphone). It never actually makes a sound and we can reliably track on the ipad. what gives? I never thought about this.
There's an inherent conflict between use as a theft tracking device, and use as a stalking device. Both situations are pretty indistinguishable. Apple is prioritizing reducing the AirTag's utility to stalkers.
> Apple is prioritizing reducing the AirTag's utility to stalkers.
No, Apple is prioritizing good publicity. A motivated stalker will just be using another product, which is a net financial negative for Apple. They just don’t want the possibility of the news talking about how someone got assaulted thanks to an Apple device.
There are ways to use AirTags that are true stalking methods and these aren't currently mitigated by Apple. If anything this is a false sense of security. Nerfing their product seems more like corporate CYA than concern for public safety.
Again prioritizing low cardinality event (stalking) instead of high cardinality event (theft) because of "security", making the device mostly pointless, good only to quickly locate some thing at home (assuming battery still holds after the thing being forgotten for years in a closet).
Apple has removed all mention of theft tracking from their site once they added the stalking protection. Airtag is for people who lose things, not finding stolen things. You have less than an hour before an Airtag alerts a thief they are being tracked.
That is also true for thieves looking to steal your vehicle by finding where you live, so it is an unfortunate intersection of crime and crime prevention.
There are much better options for vehicle tracking and theft prevention so I would personally prefer it to be harder for thieves or stalkers to track using these very easy to get devices.
Apple decided its better to not enable stalkers and get bad press for that. From tne point of view of the tracker anti theft and stalking are kinda the same. This mirrors yesterdays one about efuses btw
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...
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 guess the point of having a tag in the shape of a card is to prevent a thief from throwing the obvious airtag away, the card tag may look like an ordinary bank card and kept in the wallet longer
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.
Why everyone is so okay with wearing a tracking device? Usually there is a crowd who will bring NSA in every possible discussion, but apparently not for this worldwide functioning meter-precise tracking service?
So we have some closed-source systems(iPhones, AirTags, samsung analogs, etc) which enable owner(best case it is Apple "allowed" by you) to use established global "opt-out" tracking network?
Ironically, one of the reason Google's offerings are (were?) worse is because Google prioritized privacy and required pings from multiple phones to count a tracker as seen.
AirTags have always been "meh" about "finding" anything in motion. And by that I mean the up close "locate this device". I ASSUME it has to do with the fact that its trying to create a multiple point triangulation using only a single device (eg the phone you are on).
Even an airtag moving a little bit, will give you warnings in find my.
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.
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.)
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.
apple should have an anti-theft mode. Where you can't track it, but they can give access to local law enforcement to track it, and therefore wont go into stalker mode / alerting people about it.
If one is in close proximity to the device (say bluetooth), one can take it out of this mode and return it to normal usage.
I don’t know where you live, but where I live, I think we have a very good police force. But I would have absolutely no expectation of them getting actively involved in the tracker sleuthing of petty theft.
> But I would have absolutely no expectation of them getting actively involved in the tracker sleuthing of petty theft.
That's actually what I would love to see cops doing! Petty theft is among the most annoying nuisances there is, particularly for tourists. And I'd classify petty thefts in tourist areas, public transport and similar hotspots as aggravated cases as well.
Honestly, it doesn't take that much work. Have the mayor announce that police will now take stolen-property claims seriously and immediately follow up on reports, maybe run the occasional sting operation themselves... and the thieves will go away somewhere else all on their own.
Yes, you might run the risk of only catching some piss poor drug addicts instead of the brokers accepting and selling on the stolen merchandise - but when the brokers can't find anyone willing to risk a mandatory year in prison for petty theft, they will have to close up shop as well.
I'm kind of the opposite use case: I own four AirTags, keep them in different bags and suitcases, and I've literally never needed them.
I don't lose any luggage or bags, so most of the time they just sit there quietly burning those CR2032s. For me they've ended up feeling more like they are preventing me from anxiety than doing something that actually changes my life day to day...
I don’t lose bags either, but airlines do. The AirTag let me tell United which building in Houston in ended up in (after getting lost at SFO), and refute their gaslighting multiple times that it was heading my way. Worth its weight in gold, literally.
I diligently put airtags in all of my luggage, but I forgot to put it in a box I checked in on my last flight. That’s the one checked luggage that didn’t show up at the baggage carousel, in my entire life.
I had it delivered to me the next day, but I must have used air tags for checked luggage a 50+ times before.
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?
If you’re 2x farther away, the intensity of the sound with be 1/4, because of the inverse square law, so logically your speaker would need to be 300% louder.
I'm sure Apple appreciates the advice, especially considering how few people buy their pricey phones and accessories.
C'mon, this is the same company that sells a $230 sock for your phone. And they sold out of the first batch. Apple knows their market, and some people...don't.
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."
I have requested theft a number of times, even presented video footage. I was surprised they ask you fill out bureaucratic paperwork and at the end they do nothing, after all these taxes we pay in Europe.
I hate the stupid things. Or rather, I hate that I cannot on my android phone click "yes I know this air tag, it's owned by my wife, please stop notifying me that it's tracking me every single time I go anywhere". What an absolutely monumental annoyance in usability that doesn't seem to have any way to override it.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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?
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.
"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.
I had this experience too. They beep like this if they're not near an updated iDevice logged into your account.
You'll have the same problem if you do something like: set the AirTag up on an iPad, but then carry around with an Android phone on you or just any phone not logged into your Apple Account. The beeping is the anti-stalking feature since it thinks it's separated from its owner.
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.
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.
Actually, I feel the same! The new UI is so absolutely terrible that I’ve decided to sit this version of iOS out. So I also will not buy the new AirTags for the same reason!
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?
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.
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.
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.
Apple's Find My helps thieves more than it helps the owners:
When I was on a walk with my friend, my iPhone constantly nagged me about "AIRPODS ARE MOVING WITH YOU!!!1!" and it showed me the EXACT complete route on the map.. I didn't even ask for it!
When I lost my AirPods (which are ridiculously easy to remove from your iCloud account and Find My: just hold down the pairing button for 30 seconds), it just showed me a vague radius and "Last seen around here 12 hours ago" not even a exact time.
Pure visual object tracking in visionOS is considerable laggy (even with increased detection rate). Natively tracked peripherals (Logitech Muse, PSVR2 controllers) are super responsive, but are designed for hands and are too specialized. There is a place for generic 6DoF tracking device that can be attached to any object you want to track. This could be tiny IR LED array if you want to track it inside the field of view, but when you need precise position outside of your FoV, your options are limited.
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.
Only if they're regular citizens. Somehow masked federal thugs don't get shot; somehow the 2nd Amendment gun-humpers who so opposed federal tyranny have disappeared.
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?
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 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.
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.
Not sure about that. My Android warns me about my wife's airtags so often, that if I would actually be tracked by a malicious airtag, I would just assume it's one of my wife's tags. This could be prevented if I could mark a tag to be trusted on my Android phone, but no such feature exists.
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 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.
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.
Similar story for me. Except in Rome, and the ending wasn't happy because all I could do is watch my wife's iPhone go to Tunisia where it disappeared.
Still, in those very early days of "Find my" I could see how this was going to eventually change things.
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I need to applaud the efficiency and moxie of the Zurich / Swiss police service.
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
In certain places in America. My county sheriff's office would be more than happy to have something to do that isn't picking up somebody's stray dog. I'm sure this is true for the UK and Canada too.
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That's not a common occurrence, police in Switzerland is highly passive, and the judiciary system is highly complicit with criminals (drug dealers,thieves, white collar crimes etc), and against women (rape victims can be told to close their legs better by judges).
Saying "i am getting my gun and going to retrieve my stuff" guarantees that 6-8 police cars will converge on the location within minutes. Once there, they will apprehend the thief since they are there already.
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Thankfully you were in Switzerland rather than the states, I just never see American police caring about that.
My friend/colleague had her phone stolen while she was napping in the hospital room of her terminally ill husband. Fortunately it had MDM. Called Palo Alto PD, I sat with them and tracked it from the hotel and it was already in San Jose. They worked with SJPD live and walked them into the guy who happened to be in a parking garage peering into cars. Caught him with a backpack full of stolen phones.
The stereotype of US cops not caring isn't always true.
Unfortunate fact for the perp was the ill husband was a US Attorney and stealing his phone made it a big boy federal felony that was not looked kindly upon by the colleagues of a dying AUSA in the Northern District. I wonder if he's still in FCI Lompoc.
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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
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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.
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I was robbed at a gas station in Jersey City and the police retrieved the airtagged backpack in 20 minutes. The police was fantastic.
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.
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Unrelated to airtags but last year a couple wheels were stolen off my brand new car. My city in California falls under county sheriff jurisdiction and they actually assigned a detective to the case.
Sadly even once he got the subpoena and other paperwork to track down the criminals through Facebook (they had listed my wheels two weeks later on Marketplace) he couldn't find them since they were using VPNs.
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.
Same story in Bulgaria. A backpack with an iPhone and an iPad was stolen from a car. Had to go to the police department to file a written complaint. Weeks after that the devices were still visible in FindMy but police could not identify and catch the thieves.
So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)
Didn't they start chirping and alert the thief?
The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.
That only happens after 24 hours and only if the tag has been continuously traveling with an iPhone present.
Funny story: I actually forgot my backpack in the train at Zurich HB and it went to Basel and back again to Zurich HB, where I was able to get from the train. All the while I was nervously looking at Find My, seeing it travel and just hoping it wouldn’t be stolen.
My local police would literally laugh at me if I made that call.
Reminds me of a Big Lebowski scene. That is surprising because it is an easy win for them. They would be all after it.
I have recollection of french police using civilian appearance to collect a bike thief in a meetup between him and the bike's original owner presenting himself as a buyer.
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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.
> 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....
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I also know from experience that Zurich police will chase an AirTag location with vigor.
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Switzerland sends in swat for noise complaints, they would definitely care about a thief that could be caught.
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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?)
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Did you tell them that you have a particular set of… tags?
> 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.
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
When I lived in London, I once came across a criminal operation that was producing fake documents, in what looked like substantial quantities. British & foreign driving licences, National Insurance cards, passports, ID cards etc. Not especially high-quality, but still.
Try as I might, I could not get the Metropolitain Police interested. From Royal Mail tracking numbers, I was able to figure out which post office the docs were being sent from. I took a pile of those fake docs to a large police station literally across the street from the post office. Got a crime reference number and was told to keep the docs. :)
In Zürich, I once came off my bicycle. No one else involved, no damage to anything except myself. The police were on the scene six minutes later (they responded when a helpful passer-by called for an ambulance). Offered to take my bicycle for safekeeping while I was in hospital, which was jolly nice of them. :)
I had a camera stolen on a Zürich streetcar and when I reported it to the police they acted like it was the first crime that had ever been reported in the canton, a very serious matter indeed.
yeah this should be the standard, same here in Australia unfortunately the police will just pretend to care by taking more information and then does nothing.
haha do that in the States and the police will tell you to go F yourself.
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Racist
People steal due to economic issues, not their ethnicity.
> 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.
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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.
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And the result is that for every oh-so-sustainable AirTag sold, a keyring doohickey is dieseled/kerosened from AliExpress' China warehouse to the consumer.
You're getting a ton of jokey replies, in true internet fashion, but the real answer is acoustics. For it to sound as loud as it can with no visible speaker grille, it needs to be that shape with no keyring holes.
> 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.
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this is the smallest attachment loop i've found. It's rock solid https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CPTS8JG?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...
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My father-in-law is a builder. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he is lost in wonder. We were in an Apple Store together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build an attachment point to the tag itself. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it'
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.
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Recycled metals have always been cost effective. Recycled plastic is much more expensive than virgin plastic, but it's a very small materials cost to start with, likely totaling only a few cents.
How does that compare to previous AirTag? Whats the industry baseline for all of those, maybe gold is 100% recycled anyways in most products?
This is a great question. For example, the Pixel 10 has a similar recycling profile, although with less recycled plastic.
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”.
What level of materials recycling would be required for you to not consider it green washing?
It’s a genuine question, since I don’t like Apple and agree that we buy tons of stuff we don’t really need. That said, our bicycles can’t be insured anymore, but having AirTags at least alleviates some of the angst over leaving them in public places.
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It’s never possible for things to be good with people like you. It’s not 100% recycled, which would be better. But surely, this is better than 0% recycled??
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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.
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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/
but then the fob also costs $30 :/
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".
This feels like a good tradeoff as far as gadgets go. It doesn’t take finding that many objects for it to make up the energy cost to manufacture the AirTag.
They do require periodic battery replacements but I imagine it’s still a net savings or pretty negligible cost. I’d love to see a more formal analysis, though.
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.
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> one of these things that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it
Found the guy who literally never leaves his studio apartment and has thus never lost baggage, keys, etc.
Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention. You have less than an hour to retrieve your item before the tag alerts the thief they are being tracked. I've seen it trigger as quickly as 30 minutes.
To me, the bigger problem is the lack of ability for Android phones to register an AirTag as recognized. They've never done anything to address the problem of "drive your wife's car and her AirTag is beeping at you and your Android phone is beeping at you and there's no way to tell either one to stop".
As the owner of many airtags and some Airpods who has switched to Android, this is infuriating. I get beeps and unknown tracker notifications multiple times a day.
There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.
I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
I developed a device that turns an Airtag on and off at specific intervals (roughly 80% off 20% on). While the AirTag is off, it can’t be detected, and when it turns on again, you can locate it and with it your stolen item: https://undetectag.com I'm about to order the new version to check whether it works on it too
Given how tracking stolen items is technically identical to tracking a person, wouldn't this also be a device for undetectable stalking?
> Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention.
While this is true, Airtags are not designed for theft prevention, and never have been. They're designed to locate lost items.
Apple should be applauded for making the only tracking tags with literally any kind of anti-stalking features at all.
I'm not fully onboard with the logic that we just have to live with a certain type of criminal behavior because the technology that could prevent it can be misused to enable another type of criminal behavior. We should aim to stop any kind of criminal behavior.
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Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Initially they didn’t have it, people complained, now they do, and people still complain.
Considering theft is a property crime and stalking is often a prelude to much worse, I think they made the right choice.
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> Initially they didn’t have it
They did have anti-stalking from the start btw. People still complained that it wasn’t good enough so they reduced some of the timings.
Maybe it's different people.
Wrong bothsidesism. The right choice was making a functional product. This is not that.
> Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.
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Can it alert of my item being moved? Because it seems quite useless for the bicycle example in their screenshot.
My Samsung SmartTag gives me a notification if the bike changes position and I'm not nearby. Actually giving me a chance to track it down.
Not that I’ve found. Seems pretty reasonable trade off to me if it notified both parties rather than just the person with the tag
In addition to this, AirTag also makes a sound when on the move.
This is also quite ridiculous, as it literally gives away that there is an AirTag there. I have seen people removing the speaker to eliminate this flaw.
How useful is a GPS position for theft prevention? IME cops are not interested in doing more than filing a report after a theft, even if you have a live GPS location of the item for them. Do you try and go get it yourself?
GPS won't prevent theft, but can help in recovery. Can.
But Apple does more stuff as well, like encrypting your phone and making it so even harvesting a stolen phone for parts is unattractive (everything has serial numbers and you can't just swap a part out).
i can speak to this as i had my motorcycle stolen on NYE last year in Santa Monica with an airtag in it. the Santa Monica police said “smart, but it’s in LA so we can’t help you get it. tell the LAPD.”. it took me seven hours of calls to the LAPD while personally hunting down my bike in the shadiest areas of LA, and being a block away from getting it myself, did they come. so yes, if you’re in LA, you basically get it yourself.
in my case, the damage was so much i wish i had just left it stolen and taken the bigger insurance payout.
In Austin, they won't lift a finger because they're underfunded and don't have the resources to address nonviolent crime.
I disable the speaker in the ones I attach to luggage. (For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vAQNedIa0o )
How would airtags work as theft prevention? Airtags only enter the equation once something has already been stolen.
I think "theft recovery" is probably meant.
Setting expectations and thinning the herd. If even half of items had a well hidden air tag, and the cops successfully followed up even half of tagged thefts:
There would a. be less dumb criminals around to repeat offend and b. The smarter would-be criminals will do the calculus and and not steal items which could have tags.
Interesting, I hadn't considered theft recovery to be a use case for Airtags before. I've only used them for "where the hell did that X go".
To be fair, you'd likely ask that exact question if your X was stolen!
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It is morally wrong to stalk the thieves.
What happens after that? It goes dark? Or it just alerts the thief (stalker victim)?
I have only seen the Google side, just a single time when one of my Chipolos threw an alert on my passenger's Samsung.
My Chipolo certainly still works.
There are [cheap] tags being sold that are compatible with both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub. I would rather have a dual-network device than Apple's improved model.
Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?
Here is an example of dual-network tags:
https://www.amazon.com/Tracker-Locator-Android-Bluetooth-Fin...
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It sends alerts to the thief's iPhone or Android (if you have Apple's Tracker Detect Android app) that they are being tracked within 30 to 60 minutes. It also enables the beeping so the thief can find and remove the Airtag.
If the Airtag can't reach the thief's phone, it starts chirping by itself within an 8-24 hour window.
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It sounds like the external dimensions are going to be exactly the same or nearly so. I'm hoping the battery compartment is also identical so that third-party mounting and extended battery packs continue to work.
I recently picked up a few of these extended battery packs and it would be nice to eventually upgrade the AirTag if the extended range turns out to be meaningful. They're pretty neat, you remove the battery cover completely and only insert the half of the AirTag with the electronics and radio.
https://www.elevationlab.com/products/timecapsule
Their description does say “Works with AirTag generation 1 & 2.” Thanks for putting me on to these. Really clever products. I always feel stupid with my airtag dangling off of my camera.
Great! I scanned the page when I posted that comment, so I either missed it or they were just about to update it.
Are there any wallet-shaped Airtags yet? That's the one thing keeping me from ditching my Tiles.
Yep - I've got the UGREEN FineTrack Slim G Wallet Tracker Card in my wallet and it's perfect.
Love the fact that it's rechargeable - although a little bit annoying that it's with a USB to proprietary connector.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-Ultra-Slim-Rechargeable-Comp...
Nomad makes Find My compatible cards.
https://nomadgoods.com/in/products/tracking-card
There are none from Apple but in the past I have used Chipolos. They have some which are the size of about 3 stacked credit cards and fit in my wallet easily. The (at that time) did not feature UWB tracking but had a decent loudspeaker. Unfortunately they are single-use only and once the battery ran out (happened to me after about a year) you had to throw it away...
Didn’t know that external battery packs were a thing. That could be super useful.
Yeah, I picked them up along with some AA lithium (non-rechargeable) batteries. I also didn't know those batteries existed until recently. I knew there were rechargeable lithium AAs with a charge plug and charging circuitry built into each little cylinder, but I've heard mostly bad reviews of those.
These non-rechargeable ones have pretty good reviews though, and apparently last much longer than normal AAs (both in terms of capacity and storage). I'll probably start putting them in the handful of things I've got that still take AAs.
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.
Stupid form factor, though. Need to buy extra accessories to be able to actually mount it to anything, but I guess that's the Apple way. Why not have a hole to put a rope or anything through?
> 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.
I have a third-party tracker and the AirTag in my bicycle. The third-party tracker has no clue what it’s doing or meant to do. But then again, the AirTag is completely inaudible in a decently-sized bicycle parking garage.
i thought so too, but in practice i've been getting much better battery life from the official airtag on my keychain, than i do from the "atuvos" trackers that see much less use. high-precision UWB finding and half as many coin cells used makes the airtag an easy choice over the cheaper trackers for me.
the card-shaped one i've got in my wallet isn't going to be replaced by an official airtag any time soon though, that form factor is too nice.
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Do they plug into the Find My network that iOS devices use?
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The reliability of the other brands are quite poor though. I've tried Tile, I've tried Pebble (using Google's network) and neither has worked reliability enough. So I ended up switching to AirTags and so far I have been impressed with the reliability - it works 100% of the time which is not something I could say about Tile nor Pebble/Google.
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
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>Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent
Their hardware has been exceptional in recent years.
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.
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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?
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How are Airtags or Airpods simple?
Cramming lots of tech into a small footprint is an extremely complex affair.
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Apple is a big company. I’d be more surprised if they were completely consistent.
I’m sporting a Life360, MoniMoto and AirTags on my moto. The Life360 seemed to have better range—until it just went offline. The AirTag is still working, though.
So I’m stoked to hear about a new tag with greater range.
What airtags need is a theft mode, where anyone carrying the airtag is not alerted, but the location can be retrieved by an approved local authority after being voluntarily surrendered by the owner.
This also requires authorities that would care about this sort of case.
Wouldn't even be hard for Apple to implement, they already do this for airlines.
The challenge is how you prevent such features being abused by like stalkers
Whitelisting law enforcement so when the owner of the air tag declares it stolen nobody other than a whitelisted law enforcement org could view its location and when they did that creates an audit log?
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It would be nice if this could tie in to actively altering enforcement when it's turned on, maybe even require sharing with authorities for it to be enabled: the stalker would have to collaborate with police in order to stalk the victim.
I'm curious whether the improved range is actually going to make the product worse for my particular use case, which is being alerted when I've left my bag somewhere (this has happened to me at least 5 times over the years). My understanding is that the item left behind notifications are triggered when your phone loses contact with the AirTag, so increased range can potentially take me from being notified as I step off the train to being notified as I leave the station and the train has departed.
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.
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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.
iPhone SE for next gift? it can snap back to correct location when the jammers are off or the phone infers location from tower etc
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.
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I wish they made airtags in different form factors.
I've gotten into photography lately. I'd love to slip an airtag into more places - ideally within the housing of my camera bodies themselves. But, there's not really any room to put an airtag on or in a camera given the current airtag form factor.
You can get camera cages with secret compartments for airtags. And lens caps which take an airtag. But they take up a lot of space, and end up adding a lot of bulk to the camera itself. I wish Apple opened airtags up to 3rd party manufacturers who could buy the (tiny) circuit board directly, so they could hide it in their products better.
The better solution is the route that Insta360 took with the Go Ultra. The camera has embedded "Find My" technology. No Airtag or hiding things required, the entire camera is the tag.
All we need to do is get more camera companies to follow suit.
So they made it impossible to remove speaker, destroying its usability as a theft tracking device. One could add an airtag with a removed speaker on a bike/scooter/car and then localize it in case of theft. With the new airtag any thief will be quickly notified they are tracked.
We have an airtag in our cargo bike, connected to our ipad (neither my wife nor I have an Iphone). It never actually makes a sound and we can reliably track on the ipad. what gives? I never thought about this.
There's an inherent conflict between use as a theft tracking device, and use as a stalking device. Both situations are pretty indistinguishable. Apple is prioritizing reducing the AirTag's utility to stalkers.
> Apple is prioritizing reducing the AirTag's utility to stalkers.
No, Apple is prioritizing good publicity. A motivated stalker will just be using another product, which is a net financial negative for Apple. They just don’t want the possibility of the news talking about how someone got assaulted thanks to an Apple device.
There are ways to use AirTags that are true stalking methods and these aren't currently mitigated by Apple. If anything this is a false sense of security. Nerfing their product seems more like corporate CYA than concern for public safety.
Again prioritizing low cardinality event (stalking) instead of high cardinality event (theft) because of "security", making the device mostly pointless, good only to quickly locate some thing at home (assuming battery still holds after the thing being forgotten for years in a closet).
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Apple has removed all mention of theft tracking from their site once they added the stalking protection. Airtag is for people who lose things, not finding stolen things. You have less than an hour before an Airtag alerts a thief they are being tracked.
> Find My makes it easy to locate AirTag, Apple devices, and compatible third-party devices
The other side of this is that it can't be used to slip into someone's purse as they leave the bar and then be tracked unknowingly.
Apple leaves the door open for manufacturers to implement an anti-theft device into their goods that address both concerns.
That is also true for thieves looking to steal your vehicle by finding where you live, so it is an unfortunate intersection of crime and crime prevention.
There are much better options for vehicle tracking and theft prevention so I would personally prefer it to be harder for thieves or stalkers to track using these very easy to get devices.
We don't need to risk having people stalked/tracked just so you can play pretend sheriff.
Apple decided its better to not enable stalkers and get bad press for that. From tne point of view of the tracker anti theft and stalking are kinda the same. This mirrors yesterdays one about efuses btw
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...
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Do the third party ones have UWB/"Precision Finding"?
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Does it tell a thief a chipolo is following them around like the apple tag?
I have the ugreen card, and it works fine. https://www.ugreen.com/en-ca/products/ca-45298
Anyone stealing a wallet would immediately look through the contents and discard such card, no?
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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.
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I could be wrong but third party tags bet a subset of the tracking capabilities? Ie less accurate/less likely to be found.
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I have a wallet with a pocket for an airtag.
i guess the point of having a tag in the shape of a card is to prevent a thief from throwing the obvious airtag away, the card tag may look like an ordinary bank card and kept in the wallet longer
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.
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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.
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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.
Why everyone is so okay with wearing a tracking device? Usually there is a crowd who will bring NSA in every possible discussion, but apparently not for this worldwide functioning meter-precise tracking service?
It’s voluntary and isn’t embedded in something you need for other reason. It makes all the difference in the world.
So we have some closed-source systems(iPhones, AirTags, samsung analogs, etc) which enable owner(best case it is Apple "allowed" by you) to use established global "opt-out" tracking network?
[dead]
Awesome.
Time for me to buy my first iPhone then.
Sincerely, f** Google. I've been android user since I had to abandon Symbian, and their impotence in this one thing is staggering.
Ironically, one of the reason Google's offerings are (were?) worse is because Google prioritized privacy and required pings from multiple phones to count a tracker as seen.
AirTags are such a killer feature.
I have multiple in places like my bike, wallet and so on.
They have paid themselves so many times over and over.
> Maintaining the same form factor as the original, the new AirTag is compatible with all existing AirTag accessories
I'm glad this appears to have been a focal point of the design.
> 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?
AirTags have always been "meh" about "finding" anything in motion. And by that I mean the up close "locate this device". I ASSUME it has to do with the fact that its trying to create a multiple point triangulation using only a single device (eg the phone you are on).
Even an airtag moving a little bit, will give you warnings in find my.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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apple should have an anti-theft mode. Where you can't track it, but they can give access to local law enforcement to track it, and therefore wont go into stalker mode / alerting people about it.
If one is in close proximity to the device (say bluetooth), one can take it out of this mode and return it to normal usage.
I don’t know where you live, but where I live, I think we have a very good police force. But I would have absolutely no expectation of them getting actively involved in the tracker sleuthing of petty theft.
> But I would have absolutely no expectation of them getting actively involved in the tracker sleuthing of petty theft.
That's actually what I would love to see cops doing! Petty theft is among the most annoying nuisances there is, particularly for tourists. And I'd classify petty thefts in tourist areas, public transport and similar hotspots as aggravated cases as well.
Honestly, it doesn't take that much work. Have the mayor announce that police will now take stolen-property claims seriously and immediately follow up on reports, maybe run the occasional sting operation themselves... and the thieves will go away somewhere else all on their own.
Yes, you might run the risk of only catching some piss poor drug addicts instead of the brokers accepting and selling on the stolen merchandise - but when the brokers can't find anyone willing to risk a mandatory year in prison for petty theft, they will have to close up shop as well.
Depends on the country. Switzerland will. I suspect Japan will too
I'm kind of the opposite use case: I own four AirTags, keep them in different bags and suitcases, and I've literally never needed them. I don't lose any luggage or bags, so most of the time they just sit there quietly burning those CR2032s. For me they've ended up feeling more like they are preventing me from anxiety than doing something that actually changes my life day to day...
I don’t lose bags either, but airlines do. The AirTag let me tell United which building in Houston in ended up in (after getting lost at SFO), and refute their gaslighting multiple times that it was heading my way. Worth its weight in gold, literally.
I diligently put airtags in all of my luggage, but I forgot to put it in a box I checked in on my last flight. That’s the one checked luggage that didn’t show up at the baggage carousel, in my entire life.
I had it delivered to me the next day, but I must have used air tags for checked luggage a 50+ times before.
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?
Same. If I had a dollar for everytime I've said "hey siri where are my keys/airpods/phone" they'd have paid for themselves several times over.
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.
And you have to update to the new shitty ios.... I'd rather loose my stuff then.
"the new AirTag is 50 percent louder than the previous generation, enabling users to hear their AirTag from up to 2x farther than before"
Can that really be true?
If you’re 2x farther away, the intensity of the sound with be 1/4, because of the inverse square law, so logically your speaker would need to be 300% louder.
They don't seem to get that if it costs less people will buy more of them. I'm not doing to spend $29 to track a $100 item.
I'm sure Apple appreciates the advice, especially considering how few people buy their pricey phones and accessories.
C'mon, this is the same company that sells a $230 sock for your phone. And they sold out of the first batch. Apple knows their market, and some people...don't.
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."
Would privatizing police help?
I have requested theft a number of times, even presented video footage. I was surprised they ask you fill out bureaucratic paperwork and at the end they do nothing, after all these taxes we pay in Europe.
I hate the stupid things. Or rather, I hate that I cannot on my android phone click "yes I know this air tag, it's owned by my wife, please stop notifying me that it's tracking me every single time I go anywhere". What an absolutely monumental annoyance in usability that doesn't seem to have any way to override it.
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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I read this literally just after I ordered 4 AirTags. Great.
You have 14 days to return them.
I could return them. But I wonder how long it will take before the new AirTags are available in stores?
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Not all retailers take returns. But the old ones were likely on sale, have been for a while.
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not in all countries
Did you buy it with a credit card that offers an "extended return" policy?
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 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?
I had a similar problem, the 5 reboots fixed it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102577
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?
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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.
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The key ring costing more than the AirTag itself is wild
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.
"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.
I had this experience too. They beep like this if they're not near an updated iDevice logged into your account.
You'll have the same problem if you do something like: set the AirTag up on an iPad, but then carry around with an Android phone on you or just any phone not logged into your Apple Account. The beeping is the anti-stalking feature since it thinks it's separated from its owner.
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.
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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.
How long do they last?
Nice, does it support Android yet?
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.
Actually, I feel the same! The new UI is so absolutely terrible that I’ve decided to sit this version of iOS out. So I also will not buy the new AirTags for the same reason!
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.
> 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?
AirTags don't help if the police are understaffed and totally unconcerned.
ProTip: Avoid Austin. Property theft everywhere and the cops don't care at all.
God damn it. I just got a four pack.
But the real question is... is the speaker still glued on?
Finally! Can‘t wait to tinker with one and figure out how to disable the new tamper peotected speaker.
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.
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.
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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.
Apple's Find My helps thieves more than it helps the owners:
When I was on a walk with my friend, my iPhone constantly nagged me about "AIRPODS ARE MOVING WITH YOU!!!1!" and it showed me the EXACT complete route on the map.. I didn't even ask for it!
When I lost my AirPods (which are ridiculously easy to remove from your iCloud account and Find My: just hold down the pairing button for 30 seconds), it just showed me a vague radius and "Last seen around here 12 hours ago" not even a exact time.
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 wonder what changes they made to the firmware, as the first generation you could “fix” it so it doesn’t notify people nearby.
Is this just to lock out the cheap clones?
AirTag (and FindMy for devices like phones, tablets, etc.) might be my favorite iOS/Apple feature and one that I use regularly.
The AirTag is a fantastic device.
If only it were usable with an Android phone :(
Dual-network tags certainly exist, posted above.
https://www.amazon.com/Tracker-Locator-Android-Bluetooth-Fin...
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?
Pure visual object tracking in visionOS is considerable laggy (even with increased detection rate). Natively tracked peripherals (Logitech Muse, PSVR2 controllers) are super responsive, but are designed for hands and are too specialized. There is a place for generic 6DoF tracking device that can be attached to any object you want to track. This could be tiny IR LED array if you want to track it inside the field of view, but when you need precise position outside of your FoV, your options are limited.
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.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771650.
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Only if they're regular citizens. Somehow masked federal thugs don't get shot; somehow the 2nd Amendment gun-humpers who so opposed federal tyranny have disappeared.
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That took a long time. Better late than never.
Late? When did Apple originally announce that it would be released?
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.
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 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.
I use AirTags on car keys and wallets.
I have them on my dogs' collars, because squirrels exist.
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They might not be for you.
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?
Not sure about that. My Android warns me about my wife's airtags so often, that if I would actually be tracked by a malicious airtag, I would just assume it's one of my wife's tags. This could be prevented if I could mark a tag to be trusted on my Android phone, but no such feature exists.
Have you not seen the stories? Put one of these on the underside of an ex's car
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Isn't it easy to disable the speaker?
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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...
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.
Both Apple and Android have had anti-stalking features for years.
You mean how many where perp was caught?
The woman who ran over her cheating boyfriend was caught.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/woman-allegedly-tracks-boyfriend-w...
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