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AirTag Removable Battery Sparks Child Safety Concerns
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I’ve seen the Samsung one being opened and it required a tool to get the back off.
Nonsense! The iPhone/iPad is already the babysitter for kids so its only natural to hold Apple accountable for dope parents
I counted them. Didn't you? Maybe you weren't old enough. Young people today just can't be bothered gathering data themselves can they?
I don't need or want a child safety lock on my AirTags. If a parent is concerned about their child accidentally getting it open or ingesting / choking on the tag, then said parent should take reasonable precautions so that such does not happen, in my opinion.
The law requiring the battery compartment be secured is for products that are designed for children (e.g. toys). It doesn't apply to items not designed for children. But many products do secure coin battery compartments with a screw, e.g. Hue dimmer switches, car keyfobs. The only item I can find in my house that doesn't apply this safety measure is my Logitech Harmony remote that uses a CR2032 with nothing securing it other than a sliding cover.
But there shouldn't need to be a law, the danger is well understood. Apple should have taken better care with the design, even if just to mitigate the bad publicity that would result if a child is injured by one. The fact that the cover can come off in your pocket, as one person here has experienced, means it is unsafe and the product is fundamentally flawed - drop/lose your keys and the item designed to help you locate them stops working because the battery fell out.
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Wow, that's real die hard fanboyism, many in here put shizzle made hardware over children life.
Thumbs up!
Thumbs up!
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To clarify - when I suggested that 60% of children in the 80s died from ingesting batteries I was joking. This did not in fact happen*.
*as far as I know
I would be happy to do that because I understand basic probability and can also accept that bad things happen. Do you know how many kids over that period died of knives, abuse by step parents (no one should ever get remarried!), stairs (we need to have only single floor houses), poison ingestion, bike accidents while wearing a helmet. This is so rare a cause of death thats it laughable people are talking about death. Injury — maybe but still pretty rare cause. Too rare for all these hysterics.
Well, when I was a kid in the 1960s automobiles were not yet required to have seatbelts, toddlers could legally sit in the front seat without any child seat or restraint, children could legally ride in the open bed of pickup trucks, lawn darts were a popular game, et cetera. Kind of makes you wonder if my parents' generation, the so-called "Greatest Generation", really cared about our safety and security. But they did. They simply didn't realize at the time how stupid some of the things they did really were. Once they became aware of the dangerous things that threatened our lives they began to make changes to their personal actions and to laws. Saying that it is the sole responsibility of parents to keep danger away from their children is rather naive, to say the least. If the Greatest Generation didn't possess the imagination to see how dangerous cars without seatbelts and child seats were to children, why should we assume the current generation of parents will understand the choking dangers from small objects. Hence the reason there are warning labels on items and/or the boxes they come in to warn parents that some of the things therein could be accidentally swallowed and cause a child to choke to death. Never assume people, any people, will have the imagination to foresee all possible dangers to their children. Therefore they need to be warned about such things.
Kind of makes you wonder if my parents' generation, the so-called "Greatest Generation", really cared about our safety and security. But they did. They simply didn't realize at the time how stupid some of the things they did really were. Once they became aware of the dangerous things that threatened our lives they began to make changes to their personal actions and to laws. Saying that it is the sole responsibility of parents to keep danger away from their children is rather naive, to say the least. If the Greatest Generation didn't possess the imagination to see how dangerous cars without seatbelts and child seats were to children, why should we assume the current generation of parents will understand the choking dangers from small objects. Hence the reason there are warning labels on items and/or the boxes they come in to warn parents that some of the things therein could be accidentally swallowed and cause a child to choke to death. Never assume people, any people, will have the imagination to foresee all possible dangers to their children. Therefore they need to be warned about such things.The person said a bunch of stuff had less risk and listed stairs. My point was just pointing fun at the fact stairs are obviously dangerous. Thanks for the lesson in how stairs are dangerous. We mitigate the risk becasue they are roughly 100000x more dangerous Thats button batteries.
It is trivial to compare costs of a single screw to one life. People do this type of comparison all the time. What do people study in college these days? First you have to prove that one life is in the balance and will he saved which given the rarity of lost lives from these batteries would be very very hard to prove (ie the screw will save this one life). Second you have to assume that the cost of the extra screw has no other utility. Maybe the cost of the screw was going to go to research that extended the lives of 10000 people by 2 months. Is that worth one life? Then you find you are in the complicated real of doing hard math to weigh quality adjusted years lost against economic factors which can be done. Then you have to prove it’s an easy trade off we can make without other complications. So - have at it. But can we think about these trade offs? Of course. How else could we make good choices among complicated alternatives.
The problem with this absolutist thinking is that it is simplistic with no respect for the actual trade offs in life. Child ask for a toy from parents and they think it just happens by magic while an adult understands trade offs. Until this thread I honestly thought the rhetoric about doing anything to save even one life from CV19 was just silly politicians grandstanding. I had no idea real people saw the world in such a simplistic trade off. Oh we just add a screw and if it saves one life it’s worth it. Seriously?
You’ve tried to sound knowledgeable by talking of risk/benefit and yet you seem blind to the fact that the magnitude of risk in this case - the death of even one child, let alone likely injury to many more - so far outweighs the miniscule cost of controlling it (a single screw forming part of the battery cover) that there’s not even a discussion to be had, outside of the insanity of this forum.
As things stand, this is at some point going to blow up in Apple’s face and they are going to implicated in one or more injuries to children, at best. Do you imagine that Tim Cook and the board of Apple will be congratulating themselves on the fractional saving they’ve made per unit, in those circumstances, or will they be counting the cost of what is in retrospect a blindingly obvious design flaw?
Every one of your examples above has been and remains the subject of multiple societal interventions to reduce the risk. There are controls over the sale and carrying of knives, there are laws and agencies dedicated to preventing child abuse, commercially available stair guards and guidance on their use, many controls around poisons and their sale and packaging, cycling awareness for kids, none of these things are ignored and shrugged off as inevitable and nor should they be. As a species one of our abilities is to learn lessons and change our behaviour; we wear seat belts in cars, put fire extinguishers in buildings, and avoid putting lead in paint or asbestos in our houses. We do all these things for a reason - the same reason that, for the most part, we don’t allow button cell batteries to be easily discovered by children.
No, I deem it because that is absolutely not what you say to them in person, and you’re well aware of that.
Right? How is the battery any more of a concern than the actual Air Tag?
I listed things that kill thousands (despite all the strategies to reduce them - a subtle point about rare events and their mitigation) compared to this which kills LESS THAN ONE CHILd a YEAR in a country of 330 million. This is so rare the hysterics and moral flexing in this thread are melting my brain.
Add a screw don’t add a screw. It’s not the point. My point is the insanity of people getting worked up and concluding without evidence that there is a serious design flaw and Apple should have “done something about it”. Hysterics without evidence and a totally irrational way to approach the problem.
Button battery deaths are so rare you could never prove that adding a screw To Apple or Tile or Samsung could reduce that one death a year. So when you confidently claim there is a child’s life in the balance you are talking nonsense. Then moving on to “if it even could theoretically save one life” we are not even having an intelligent discussion we are just shouting at the sky like cavemen chasing off magic spirits.
Because as has been explained many times in this thread, theres a good chance the airtag could pass through or at least be surgically removed without serious harm to the child, whereas the battery itself (outside the packaging of the airtag) will most definitely cause internal burns and life changing, or indeed life ending injuries.
You will have a major disadvantage in a game of hide and seek.