Comment by FigurativeVoid
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
There is a lot of variance amongst third party/clone tags. I had some grey plastic losanges for a while they were junk and all ended up in the trash. Now I have a bunch of Hoco tags and they’re decent (especially for the price)
Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.
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.
Do they plug into the Find My network that iOS devices use?
Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.
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Yes
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
I'm not convinced AirPods are that "simple" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB_8dGKh9JI
yes, apple has a LOT of hidden complexity. Another example is their dongles - many of them have significant processing power, like video conversion chips inside the shell.
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Or their chargers! https://www.chargerlab.com/apple-18w-usb-c-power-adapter-a16...
Airpods are a great example of good UX making things seem simple. There's a ridiculous amount of engineering that goes into making them work as well as they do.
>Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent
Their hardware has been exceptional in recent years.
How are Airtags or Airpods simple?
Cramming lots of tech into a small footprint is an extremely complex affair.
Simple user experience.
I've started to dislike the narrative that "Apple never leads the pack, but it waits to release the best product."
But that hasn't been true for a decade. Most improvements have been marginal, and they totally missed the boat on LLMs.
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.
I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google
That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful
LLMs are way outside their lane. With that said they've been focused on the underlying components to enable LLMs since way before ChatGPT was on the scene: Unified Memory, Neural Accelerator, even Spotlight counts (as a data source), etc...
There was no world where they were going to be the breakthrough leader in LLM development. That's a problem they can catch up on when they need to or license the technology.
Why should Apple care about LLMs? They missed the boat on cloud, cryptocurrencies and on search engines. So what? It's not their business - they can just license a good offering and move on to what they do best : Products.
I can see it in AirTags, but, haven't used AirPods myself, what is so "magical" about them?
Also, my understanding is that AirTags are only usable if you have an iPhone, am I wrong?
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
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I've used them with my iPad. I don't have a Mac, but I would guess they work with any Find My-capable machine.
AirPods are great! You can use them with an Android, and it will let you know there's AirPods travelling with you every time!
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
I would not call that usable.
Apple is a big company. I’d be more surprised if they were completely consistent.