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So no new Airtags announced

D

deeddawg

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jun 14, 2010
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6,618
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I honestly half expected some sort of redesign to come out to address the speaker / silencing stuff.

Not that I wanted them to as I may still buy a couple to use in luggage or bikes - with the understanding a thief may be alerted within a couple hours - and would want to disable the speakers.
 
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deedawg, I have found that Apple has greatly enhanced their Tracking algorithm. I found that an alert is given via phone message in 2 hours to the non-owned tag person in possession. Then the Tag will start chirping at about hour 3. Disabling the speakers will not stop the Phone alerts. But, if they can't find the Tag, even if chirping, maybe they will put 2&2 together and jettison the stolen item. Once not moving with that phone, the Tag reverts to a normal mode and you will have a chance to locate based on the "community" pings and reporting.

REMEMBER, all the locations are the location of the phone pinging the device and not the device. In the case of phones moving in a car, the location reported could be 1000 feet away from the actual location of the Tag. Good luck with that! =)
 
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@mckinney3 yeah, that's the sort of scenario I envision w.r.t. bicycles. Placing the Airtag in a location not so easily found might increase the chance the thief ditches the bike. Might help, might not help, but even a small chance of recovery is better than zero chance.

and yes, the location report is from the phone which "heard" the AirTag - and as someone demonstrated, there can be lag between contact and reporting, offsetting the reported location.
 
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deeddawg said:
@mckinney3 yeah, that's the sort of scenario I envision w.r.t. bicycles. Placing the Airtag in a location not so easily found might increase the chance the thief ditches the bike. Might help, might not help, but even a small chance of recovery is better than zero chance.

and yes, the location report is from the phone which "heard" the AirTag - and as someone demonstrated, there can be lag between contact and reporting, offsetting the reported location.
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One would hope that Apple works with their partners to have different behaviour for those trying to leverage the Find My network (such as bicycle manufacturers) - where the intent really is theft prevention / property recovery.

Edit: Oh, and, per the "new airtags" topic - I really can't see Apple investing huge amounts of R&D into these - they're a $40 product? They make more off of the Apple Watch sport bands.

Someone really needs to drive a "must have" use case that can't be solved by tweaks to the Find My software, firmware updates to the tags and the back-end infrastructure to justify a hardware upgrade.
 
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fischersd said:
One would hope that Apple works with their partners to have different behaviour for those trying to leverage the Find My network (such as bicycle manufacturers) - where the intent really is theft prevention / property recovery.

Edit: Oh, and, per the "new airtags" topic - I really can't see Apple investing huge amounts of R&D into these - they're a $40 product? They make more off of the Apple Watch sport bands.

Someone really needs to drive a "must have" use case that can't be solved by tweaks to the Find My software, firmware updates to the tags and the back-end infrastructure to justify a hardware upgrade.
Click to expand...

The trouble is that the requirements for proper tracking of lost property very closely match the requirements for tracking a stalking victim.

From a technological standpoint, how do you differentiate user intent?

Both use cases depend upon the tracking device not alerting anybody near the tracking device.

How does one differentiate between an AirTag tracking a stolen bicycle and an AirTag tracking an estranged spouse’s car? Or to be more morbid, how does
one differentiate between an AirTag tracking a stolen backpack and an AirTag tracking the coat pocket of a woman a predator sees at a club.

Although Apple did not open Pandora‘s box, given the pre-existing prevalence of small GPS trackers, they have brought this conundrum to the general consciousness.

At minimum, this will hopefully make people more aware of how easily they can be tracked and not notified. We must remember, Apple AirTags are the only device on the market that will notify people they are being tracked
 
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deeddawg said:
The trouble is that the requirements for proper tracking of lost property very closely match the requirements for tracking a stalking victim.

From a technological standpoint, how do you differentiate user intent?

Both use cases depend upon the tracking device not alerting anybody near the tracking device.

How does one differentiate between an AirTag tracking a stolen bicycle and an AirTag tracking an estranged spouse’s car? Or to be more morbid, how does
one differentiate between an AirTag tracking a stolen backpack and an AirTag tracking the coat pocket of a woman a predator sees at a club.

Although Apple did not open Pandora‘s box, given the pre-existing prevalence of small GPS trackers, they have brought this conundrum to the general consciousness.

At minimum, this will hopefully make people more aware of how easily they can be tracked and not notified. We must remember, Apple AirTags are the only device on the market that will notify people they are being tracked
Click to expand...
Simple - it's not an airtag that's built into the bicycle. It's a different device type on the Find My network - one that can't be transported to another device (Apple can control this though engineering specs that the vendors provide to Apple) - make sure that the antennae is part of the bicycle frame, for example, so the actual unit can't be removed and used for nefarious purposes.

Similarly car makers may want to license this access...same deal. It's built in.

Now, quite possibly they haven't enabled family sharing for AirTags yet as they want to ensure that people aren't using them to track their family members (though there's easy enough ways to ensure whomever the "owner" is of the airtag acquieses to the sharing of the AirTag's location).
 
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Feek said:
But they're not designed for tracking stolen goods, they're for when you lose your keys.
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"Not designed for" doesn't necessarily preclude using them for additional purposes, it just means the user must understand (and has no basis to complain about) the limitations surrounding the "off label" use.

BTW, do you commonly reply to six month old posts?
 
norwaypianoman said:
Hi!
Yes, I am the one who revived this thread back to its original answer.

Are the rules on macrumors to rather make a new thread ?

Me
Click to expand...

I don't know that there's a specific rule against resurrecting months-dormant threads, but it does tend to cause confusion since many people don't pay attention the to dates and start replying to six month old comments.

I'd say your question deserved its own thread, as the thread title isn't really related to your actual question.

Your availability in Norway may be a fluke. 4-packs are available for pickup today at the twelve nearest Apple stores here in the southeast US. Likewise I'm showing good availability at various other retailers.
 
AirTags continue to be a savior for me ! I keep forgetting things in places, and so comforting to know where my luggage is when I land as soon it pings an iPhone. And we use it to find our cat in the house ;)
 
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