Because you might be too far away from that location such that you cannot easily get there to get it.
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AirTags Separated From Owners for Three Days or More Play Audible Sound When Moved
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Found our snarky apple fanoboi. Also, you seem to speak with authority about the nuances of an unreleased product.
I get that. But it can serve multi use.
I just wanna know if the person disables it can I enable it again from my phone? How often does it make a sound?
maybe we can turn off the sound.
Exactley. I want to know how long it works and can I disable the sound
The primary purpose is for stuff you lose (or misplace). If you are close enough, you can pick it up yourself. If somebody else finds it before you get there on your own (or if it is too far away), they can either just keep it safely in their possession until you can pick it up or it gets returned to you by other means. Of course there is always the question whether it is better to try to go and get your object yourself (but possibly leave it lying openly in the street) or mark it as lost and hope that somebody honest picks it up.
If something gets stolen, you have to first hope that the thief doesn't see the tracker (or doesn't know it is a tracker) and then either try to recover it yourself or with the help of the authorities.
I am assuming that the beeping feature will only get activated when you mark the tag stolen but if you leave on vacation and have a tag on your dog or keys or whatever, you can still locate the tag without causing it to beep, like you do now. I can open FindMy and see my daughter's iphone, ipad, airpods on the map but not make a sound. Unless I explicitly make it lost, then it will start beeping. Is my assumption correct?
Actually, in one of the footnotes on the main AirTag page, Apple notes that its one-year estimate is "based on an everyday use of four play sound events and one Precision Finding event per day," so I suspect that most users will get more than one year of battery life.
Of course, this also assumes that you're buying premium batteries. There are some really cheap CR2032 batteries that don't last as long. For instance, I buy three Sunbeam batteries for a buck at my local dollar store for my ecobee remote sensors, but I have to change them every 3-4 months. A Duracell or Energizer battery lasts closer to a year, but those cost $2 each.
You cannot put the battery back in remotely (which is the safest way for the person that wants to disable the tracker). If somebody wants to disable a tracker that they have discovered, there are plenty of ways, from a hammer to a microwave (but if that somebody knows that the battery is removable, they might do that preferentially).
I'm not sure it will disable the audible sound after three days if another family member is nearby, but Apple notes that you can turn off the iPhone alerts "indefinitely" for AirTags that are registered to other people in your Family Sharing group.
You found somebody who is exasperated at people not understanding the basics of how trackers work and not using simple logic to unpack the known behaviour that Apple has informed us about.
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Unless the person has an iPhone, in which case they'll find out about it much sooner.
To be fair, an AirTag that's planted on somebody who doesn't have another Apple device could be considerably less useful for stalkers. You definitely won't get real-time tracking information, and if the person doesn't happen to hang out around any other iPhone or Apple device users, you may not get any location information back at all.
That's exactly it. Apple has decided that protecting people from stalkers — some of whom could be violent — is far more important than helping people recover stolen items. Things can be replaced. People can't.
I don't see how? Find My for iPhones doesn't let every iPhone user see all iPhones in their surroundings, there is no reason why that would be different for AirTags.
Since the day that smartphones had software for their owner to track them, it was possible to simply slip a phone into another persons pocket/bag/car. Of course, the battery life made that only a solution for short periods.
Not exactly. Other people will only see the AirTag on their iPhone if they pick it up and start moving around with it to different locations. The alert is "AirTag Found Moving With You" not merely "AirTag Found." It's a privacy feature designed to prevent people from being stalked by someone else planting an AirTag on them, since if the user has an iPhone you'd basically get real-time tracking through the AirTag much like you could by using Find My Friends (if they were your friend).
If it's left where it is, or even if someone picks the item it's attached to up and moves it but puts it back down again, the location is simply reported silently back to Apple from whatever iPhones or other relatively modern Apple devices are in proximity.
A noise will not be made at all until the AirTag has been separated from its owner's iPhone for at least three days. This will only happen if the tag is moved in any way.
After being separated from its owner for three days, the AirTag makes a loud sound like a crying baby that misses its mother.
Nope, that would prevent the anti-stalking protection (as the stalker obviously wouldn't mark the item as lost and you don't have to mark the item as lost to access its location). AirTags aren't suitable for tracking animals that are in the care of multiple people (unless they can be linked via Family Sharing to that tag) as AirTags are linked to an AppleID and devices linked to that AppleID.
And you don't think you mark items as stolen. You mark them as lost.
Your iPhone will show you an "AirTag Found Moving With You" alert if it detects an unknown AirTag travelling with you to different locations. Apple doesn't specify in its support article exactly how quickly this will happen, but it seems to be on the order of hours, not days.
In fact, I suspect it's based on how far you travel with it, rather than how long it's been detected for.
It's much more important for iPhone users to get this notification, since if somebody else plants their AirTag on you, they can basically track you in real-time through your iPhone, since it will be regularly reporting the location of the nearby AirTag. Non-iPhone users with an AirTag on them will only have their location disclosed when they happen to be near other Apple devices.
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What if I attach one to my bike and it gets stolen? Will nearby iDevices report the location to me silently or will the owners of the nearby iDevices be notified about my tag?
You are right, the reported 3-day period was strictly only for the beeping alert. For the 'somebody-is-tracking-you' notification, this has not been specified yet (but almost certainly is also something Apple can still tweak server-side). But that period shouldn't be too short either if one wants a chance to track a stolen item (thieves getting notifications like 'the bag you have stolen has a tracker in it, beware the owner might be tracking you' would reduce the usefulness for this scenario significantly). But of course, the main focus of AirTags is finding stuff yourself or another honest person finding it (not tracking thieves).
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Notifications only appear if an unrecognized AirTag is moving around with the person to different locations (and the actual owner of it is not also with it).
So, if the person riding your bike (or carting it away in their truck) has an iPhone, they'll likely get a notification at some point that there's an AirTag travelling with them, although that doesn't necessarily happen right away.
Other iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, etc, that the AirTag comes into contact with will silently report it from their location as it passes by, although it's unclear how long it has to be in proximity of another device before it gets picked up and reported. It may not happen if the item with the tag is just whizzing by someone else's iPhone on the freeway.
Yup, the text in that support article — particularly the footnote about not being able to play a sound — suggests that it's less than a day: "wait to see if another alert appears as you move from location to location during the day."
I strongly suspect it's based much more on movement than time. I don't think the AirTag cares about being moved around at all in this case. Rather, it's about the iPhone that's accompanying it recognizing the fact that it keeps seeing the same AirTag following it around. After all, it's the iPhone that the notification comes from in this case, not the AirTag itself.
i'm sure that will be added, same as the apple card is now available in a 'family' set up. my wive hates all these gadgets anyway, so i don't think we'll every run into an issue where she wants to track the car — she'll just call me and have me do itYou can disable any of your AirTags at any time. The question of using them in items (my fingers just typed iTems) that multiple people use (like a car) is certainly a relevant one. Most likely initially those are just things for which AirTags well-suited for (though in future those could be solved by some kind of family ownership of specific AirTags).
So it's not good for stalking your partner if he/she got an iPhone, but if they don't you can track them for 2-3 days (as long as they're around people with iPhones that report their location)((And as long as their lover doesn't have an iPhone.))