I know this is useful (for something), but I'm stuck on the plot holes in the motivating story...
Why didn't they replace the battery when the app complained?
How long would a thief really keep the AirTag anyway?
If the thief did keep the AirTag and you tracked them down, then what? A confrontation has a fairly high chance to have a worse result than losing some equipment. You could try to get the police to do it, but that's going to take more time, during which the thief is even more likely to ditch the AirTag.
Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device. They're really for something lost, not stolen. Generally, they are specifically designed to not work well in adversarial situations.
I've retrieved stolen bikes, one because of an airtag. Showed up with a couple friends standing by but not trying to be intimidating. It's mostly about staying calm and telling the person this is mine, I'm taking it. They always say "no it's my friend's, you're gonna piss him off" or "I just bought this" or something. Maybe you offer some fraction of a "reward" to smooth it along and cut your losses. Don't try to start a fight and it generally goes OK. Also, try not to accuse them of stealing, they'll just get defensive. "It's someone else who is screwing us both, but this is mine sorry."
If it’s left anywhere in the open at anytime, you can repossess it legally as well. This happens with auto repossessions all the time. You don’t owe anyone an explanation as it’s yours - just take it if you can do so safely.
This is my experience as well. Most people don't want confrontation. I found my stolen bike when somebody was out riding it. I told them it was stolen from me, they said "OK" and handed it over. It was either them who stole it or they bought it suspiciously cheap and knew it was stolen.
There exists a small percentage of men who will go absolutely savage on somebody for stealing from them, and the existence of those people is probably a bigger crime deterrent than the police.
So I say, shine on you crazy air tag tracking vigilante diamonds.
I don't want someone to put razor wire on their catalytic converters so that it slices thieves' fingers off. I do, however, wish to leave the impression with thieves that perhaps my catalytic converter is protected by insanity armor.
You'd think so, but America is the most armed country in the world and most of us have had something stolen. I think the overall sentiment is "I'm like 99% going to get away with this and pawn it for money" and they're right.
A lot of those thiefs are not hardened criminals, because the payoff for this kind of crime is usually a small fraction of the actual value of the things stolen. Most of time it is the average wimpy addict and the reason he resort to this kind of criminal activity is preciselly because he is not ready for the violent potential of more profitable criminal activities.
If you relativelly fit, and have some experience with actual fights or training in martial arts, it is not that stupid to try to recover your stuff.
If you don't feel confortable with the prospect of any kind of violent confrontation or don't have the street smarts to evaluate the risk potential of saidconfrontation, you'd still have the hope that the police would do something anyway if you have the location of your goods.
Really, at some time we need to stop glorifying cowardice and reclaim a little bit of dignity.
I mostly agree. I don't think its cowardice most of the time though. Its that laws now favor criminals if you attempt to do anything yourself. Its become public policy that "rich" people buying things can simply absorb the loss and the police don't even have to do anything because no one bothers to report it. The police win because crime stats go down, thiefs win because they get the goods, the victim absorbs all the cost and if they try to do anything the victim goes to jail for whatever charges that made the police have to get up and work.
> Really, at some time we need to stop glorifying cowardice and reclaim a little bit of dignity.
And getting into a physical fight with real injury potential because of an item?
If it is a cheap thing it is not worth it. If it is more expensive usually the law is on your side. Either way, there's no need for physical confrontation.
> the reason he resort to this kind of criminal activity is preciselly because he is not ready for the violent potential of more profitable criminal activities.
That's a gamble. What if the reason is that, although the thief _could_ be violent, they were smart enough to realize that they can get more results with less personal risk? In which case, your 'martial arts' training is meaningless when you have a knife or a bullet going through you.
"If you relativelly fit, and have some experience with actual fights or training in martial arts, it is not that stupid to try to recover your stuff."
Anyone with actual experience will tell you that no amount of training will save you from the lucky stab/shot/unknown. Sure, you might win 9/10 times, but is that worth it? Sometimes maybe, other times no. Usually it's better to notify police and let the system handle it. If you handle it yourself, the system in many jurisdictions will fuck you just as bad as the real criminal unless you actively witnessed it or were attacked first.
Being fit doesn’t do anything against a knife or a fire-gun, is not being a coward, it’a just the logical conclusion. The people who want to stay fit in order to potentially fight burglars/thieves are doing it wrong, they should train in either gun use or how to better handle a knife. And, of course, have an expensive lawyer at the ready in case something goes wrong and you actually get to physically hurt said thief/burglar.
> have some experience with actual fights or training in martial arts
And significant amounts of people also have neither of these things. At the very least “martial arts” training is particularly unlikely.
I’m the only one I know in my circle with practical fight experience and it’s because I grew up in shitty places. That probably says more about the privileged area I now live, and the kinds of people it attract though to be fair.
Eh. Recognition that the state having a monopoly on violence is a better system than individuals exercising it isnt cowardice. This is one area where cops actually can and will do what you want them to, might as well let them if possible.
And yeah maybe any reasonable human can beat up most tweakers, but one could have a knife or gun. Even if that’s a 5% shot, my life is worth more than 20x my bike.
Really, at some time we need to stop glorifying cowardice and reclaim a little bit of dignity.
As a society, yes, but do you want to be the one to sacrifice your life or livelihood, for the slim chance of having an impact on society?
A lot of those thiefs are not hardened criminals
Right, but I wonder how long a stolen bike is in the original thief's possession, before it's sold to a fence? And perhaps the fence is in better shape or has buddies for protection against retheft?
I've been wanting exactly this for so long. I want to bury an AirTag in my luggage, backpack, etc. and never think about it again. In those scenarios, it doesn't _need_ to be tiny. I'd rather trade compactness for longevity.
However, an AirTag attached to my keys _should_ be small and it's easily accessible so I don't mind swapping the battery as needed.
I fully expect Apple to release the airTag in different form factors. They can then also sell a whole bunch of new accessories. A 'pen' form factor with replaceable AAAA battery might be perfect for myself.
This is really a non-issue. Your phone literally tells you when the tag's battery is low. I'd rather do that once every 365 days than having to carry 2 AA batteries for 365 days/year.
In all seriousness, if I put an Airtag on my $6k bike and it was stolen and it showed where it was. I'd be getting that bike back and not worrying too much about a confrontation.
Worst case scenario I report it to police directly and it tells them exactly where it is.
If something is stolen, if I don't know where it is that makes the problem 10x worse. At the very least the airtag shows where that item is (unless it has been found and thrown away).
My experience of an airtag on my stolen $300 bike was that the tag showed up in a location the cops told me was about a block away from a notorious chop shop in the city. I just sighed and bought a new bike.
You could try to get the police to do it, but that's going to take more time, during which the thief is even more likely to ditch the AirTag.
During the most recent American election I saw at least three news stories on television about campaign sign thieves being tracked down through the use of AirTags put in one of the signs. To my surprise, in each case the police were right there, and in two of the cases, the signs were still loaded in the thieves' cars. So it does seem to work.
Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device.
They aren't anti-theft devices as in padlocks. But the more often that thieves start wondering if the thing they're taking might have an AirTag in it, they might start reconsidering some of the petty thefts.
It's like a surveillance camera. A camera, itself, can't stop a crime. But the possibility that someone's watching can act as a mild deterrent.
It's good for society, and (in the evolutionary equilibrium) results in massively reduced defection, if people are willing to take on high risk to aggressively punish defectors.
>stuck on the plot holes in the motivating story... How long would a thief really keep the AirTag anyway?
you discover something has been stolen (or lost), and not knowing exactly when it happened but curious about that too, you immediately try to look up where it was last seen and if it's still tracking. What's the problem with that scenario, sounds perfectly reasonable.
he wants the long battery not because the thief is going to carry it around for 10 years, but simply so that it will more likely to be charged and location tracking at the time it is stolen from the owner.
- To change a battery, you need to not only see the notification but also be physically proximal to the device and have a fresh battery available. It can take some time to meet all these conditions and sometimes you simply forget.
- A single air tag only needs the battery replaced roughly every six months. However, the rate of replacements increases as you are managing more air tags. It's easy to be replacing a battery every few weeks.
- Replacement fatigue is a thing. At some point, we just get lazy.
I keep my BBQ on my front patio, directly in front of my battery-powered Ring camera. The battery on that camera needs to be recharged and replaced every two months. I try to get to it as quickly as I can - ideally during the low-battery state and before the battery dies completely. One time, however, I got lazy/forgot. Two days after the battery died, my BBQ was stolen.
Re: antitheft device
You're right. Apple markets AirTags for recovering lost items, not stolen ones. Nevertheless, they can be very effective for recovering stolen items. My local police department will aid in recovering stolen property. If the item has an AirTag that pings a location, an officer will investigate. In the case of my BBQ, the officer was willing to look for it same-day but, alas, I did not have an AirTag on it.
This product actually helps as it effectively hides the air tag. This makes it less likely that a thief would find and discard the airtag. They'd only be looking for it if their iPhone notifies them and, even then, they may not be able to discriminate which item contains the tag. Best case scenario: they discard the entire stolen unit, keeping the air tag with it.
> physically proximal to the device and have a fresh battery available
I think it's also worth saying, these batteries aren't the standard AA batteries most people on hand, they're 2032 (I believe? or 2025) "quarter batteries" which isn't something a lot of people just keep around. So in addition to being physically proximal, once they've figured out how to open it up and being surprised by the "weird battery," they've also got to remember which it was when presented with a wall of similar looking "quarter batteries" at the store (see: my lack of assurity even having previously replaced these).
Come to latam and you'll see some intense confrontation when something gets stolen. I was in a hostel when someone broke into lockers and they tracked him to the a bus station and got all their stuff back + dude in handcuffs to police station.
> They're really for something lost, not stolen. Generally, they are specifically designed to not work well in adversarial situations.
In practice, AirTags tell you where it is, which is useful for lost or stolen items.
What you do with that information is a whole other topic outside this scope.
I've recovered or helped recover several stolen items located with an AirTag and I'll keep on buying them as long as they're good for both.
So far in the cases I've been involved, the thief wasn't aware of the AirTag. In some cases, they had iPhones on them. I'm not sure why they did not get an "AirTag is following you" notification, or why they ignored it.
I don't use the Apple ecosystem as my primary, but I do have a bunch of tags I use in different cases for different items. Some of my items are things like motorsports vehicles or trailers and other things that are around but often out of sight.
If something were to go missing I may not notice immediately. It also seems the batteries in AirTags die faster in areas where climate control isn't the norm. Changing these out every year is a pain because some are hidden in areas that aren't easy to get to.
I hope these work well. And I was pleasantly surprised by the price point. Already ordered!
Also... I already own ElevationLabs Surface Mounts that I use and they are well made products. I love finding brands like this because it's not the norm on outlets like Amazon anymore. So when I find a good product I'm more than happy to keep buying their products, the premium is worth it.
I've had AirTags in my luggage that seemed ok, but the batteries died mid-trip which was somewhat suboptimal. Longer battery life seems like a good selling point vs. replacing those annoying CR2032 before every trip.
We put AirTags in road cases/Pelican flight cases packed with AV/IT equipment. Pelican makes a stick-on AirTag holder that works well.
We’ve found the AirTags work just as well as LTE/4G GPS trackers —- with no-ongoing costs, better battery life (we get 6-9 months on the AirTags, 4-6 weeks on the GPS trackers), and AirTags are 1/5 the cost of an LTE tracker.
> If the thief did keep the AirTag and you tracked them down, then what?
We recently recovered a laptop simply because it was tracked. Took the location to the police and they did the rest. It’s most definitely an anti-theft device in my case
I have an AirTag, and no iphone. I used my wife's tablet to set it up. I don't think I will get timely battery alerts from it because I'm not bought in to the apple ecosystem fully.
In fact IIRC the first thing that happened when AirTags were announced were a bunch of concerns that surreptitious AirTags were usable as stalking devices and this seems to bring that concern up again.
without commenting on the rest of it, i can share anecdotally that i currently have 3 dead airtags that i have been procrastinating updating the batteries on
> A confrontation has a fairly high chance to have a worse result than losing some equipment.
Maybe. I agree it's a risk I'd ask myself more than a few times if I'm willing to take these days, but in my youth and when I was less economically secure I never had a problem taking matters like these into my own hands.
Every time I've tracked down a stolen item (phones were the most common with early tracking apps, but before that I've gone after stolen bikes, Discmans, etc.) the thief simply gave up the item without so much as a verbal altercation. The surprise that someone was crazy enough to call them on their bullshit was enough to shock them into just complying. Perhaps some shame as well, I'm not certain.
This has been true since my early teen days when I worked for a small retail store where the owner was way crazier than I ever have been. He took me along on some "repo" trips where folks had written bad checks against expensive items. These were generally in bad neighborhoods and I was certain he was going to get shot - but he never did. Some yelling was the most I witnessed and every time we got the items in question back safe and sound - usually with the person in question helping to load them into the truck.
I'd probably still track an item down and knock on someone's door if I was confident it was the correct location. These days it's basically your only recourse, and despite the relatively minor economic loss vs. my income at this point in my life I think it's important for societal reasons. When everyone simply gives up and lets the criminals and petty thieves "win" without so much as challenging on them, society rapidly crumbles. Relying on law enforcement is a last resort, even though the modern day take is they are the front line response. We see how well that is going. Poorly.
If I owned a retail shop I'd also confront any shoplifters and back up any of my staff who decided to do the same themselves. I understand this might end up costing me more money and make insurance difficult. Punishing such behavior for "liability" reasons is utterly asinine. It should be rewarded, but not encouraged or forced on employees by ownership. When I stopped shoplifters in the 90's at the shops I worked at, it wasn't because I thought my low pay was worth the personal risk. I did it because it was the right thing to do and I knew the owners had my back if anything bad happened. Firing clerks for giving a damn about society is one of my huge pet peeves of modern life. And yes, I am well aware of the risk and horrible outcomes that rarely happen in such situations.
So tldr; I see it as a duty to society to make an attempt at challenging these things for myself and friends that ask for help. Yes, that does incur some personal risk to my safety that cannot be squared with the economic reward. It's a tradeoff I, and others, have calculated for ourselves.
It's utterly corrosive to actual hard working folks doing the right thing to be forced to watch some asshole professional thief push out a cart full of power tools from Home Depot. Knowing full well that they would be fired if they so much got in the way of the cart. It's ridiculous we've normalized such things and justified it with the liability fairy. The executive class has entirely failed society on this point. If someone wants to take on the personal risk, the response should be high praise - not punishment. You get more of what you incentivize.
I have some sympathy for your argument, but I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the power dynamic between citizens and criminals.
Some of the petty thieves will think twice if they hear about other thieves getting beat up. Many of them will simply respond with violence.
Look at Latin American countries where thieves will shoot you dead for an iPhone.
The bicycle thieves are going to steal no matter what. They have to score their next hit. Better that they can do that armed only with an angle grinder rather than a pistol, too.
And if someone decides to turn a bicycle theft into a murder, well, the bicycle thief can usually "live off the land" much easier than you can. When you are used to living on the street and all you need is your next hit, it's much harder to catch you for murder, even if you can be identified.
In a fight where you have more to lose, are an order of magnitude more likely to be held accountable, and your opponent is irrational, effectively anonymous, and probably more practiced in violence than you, escalation seems unfavorable even if it leaves you with a shitty feeling.
The airtag case doesn't have a gap large enough to allow a regular wire to pass through. I guess you'd need to drill the cover, or just discard the cover and use tape. Then you could use one of these dummy batteries:
I have a dozen of those style temperature gauges all over my house. Mine are actually a slightly smaller, square version. You can use Home Assistant to read the Bluetooth temperature and humidity readings from them. They ended up costing maybe $3 each when buying several at a time. Battery tends to last a bit over a year.
Nice solution, but the bigger problem is how AirTags can basically be turned off, which makes it poor for many use cases.
Of course, I get it from Apple's perspective, they dont want AirTags to be used to tail others. However, that precludes it from being used for theft tracking.
For example, I use an AirTag on my bicycle. If someone steals the bicycle, they are literally informed "an air tag is following you" https://support.apple.com/en-us/119874
There are a lot of things I'd love to put long-term AirTags on (luggage, snow-blower, childrens' backpacks) but if theft isnt really deterred, then the case for a bulkier AirTag is quite reduced.
I don't understand why AirTags being used for stalking would open Apple to lawsuits. If I buy a hammer and use it to attack someone, the manufacturer of the hammer isn't open to a lawsuit.
Of course I'm not saying Apple shouldn't try to protect people from stalkers using their control over their products, I just don't see why it would make Appld responsible if someone misused their products.
Agreed on the trade-off. And there are some absolutely 1000% winning use cases (lost cats, lost dogs, lost luggage). However, lets look at the constraints and outcomes:
- Me or other people need to be around (since airtags jump off others' devices)
This removes use cases like tracking lost marine goods, tracking lost drones, etc.
- Item being tracked has to be big enough to be worth the extra size/weight of the long life battery wrapper
This removes most common use cases like wallets, remotes, etc.
- Item being tracked has to be something you actually lose w/o wrongdoing. Makes sense for backpacks, purses, parked cars.
But, most capital equipment wouldnt be "lost" it would be stolen, so that is out.
Any tracker can be turned off if a thief manages to find it - but yeah a notification letting them know they need to look isn’t great.
I use an AirTag on my e-bike - there’s quite a few hidden mounts out there that look like normal rear reflectors or slot in between a water bottle cage and the bike frame. It’s also trivially easy to pop the AirTag open and remove the speaker so it can’t beep.
I bought my AirTags before there were any compatible third party options, but the non-Apple AirTags don’t have the UWB chip inside and don’t support the precision finding feature which would also make them more difficult to find.
Thanks for this - I never thought that the act of disabling would create a record, but that makes sense! I wonder if that is something law enforcement can track and act on.
Are AirTags actually useful for anti-theft purposes?
I threw one in the trunk of my car (just in case - I ordered a 4-pack and I had a spare one), and every single time I drive somewhere it chirps loudly when I'm exiting my driveway, making its presence immediately obvious without any delays, and despite my phone being with me in the car.
Yes, actually. It's not a panacea, but it's a foothold.
Nearly all my hardside cases have an airtag stuffed in one of the "Surface Mount" kits from ElevationLab. it looks like a pressure valve on the other side, and I might replace them with Security mounts if I'm really worried. Having those was a FANTASTIC way to track my cases as I left them with a (trusted) friend to be shipped along some other Very High Value gear. Being able to see what was going on (and know when it had reached its destination) was invaluable. On the way back, I could see my luggage as it slugged its way through the airport luggage handling system. It's not real-time but good enough for rough location.
A friend of mine was able to locate their stolen vehicle down to the block and then drone-find the vehicle from there, call the cops, and ended up busting an interstate chop shop in the process. The AirTag consistently got gasps of updates from passing vehicles and the neighbor's HomePod.
All this because she had hidden an airtag in the gas cap.
There are airlines that are encouraging people to put airtags/tiles/samsung trackers on their checked luggage because it helps them keep the airport handlers in check. A prime example of this is flying with guns (yes, you can fly with guns!) and how having an airtag made it EASIER to recover the firearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHyb2amIkzo (This happened AGAIN, by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBngUc3rmY0 -- Yes, airlines are TERRIBLE about handling these things!)
> There are airlines that are encouraging people to put airtags/tiles/samsung trackers on their checked luggage because it helps them keep the airport handlers in check.
They'd rather do anything than pay airport handlers better lol
There is something wrong with your configuration/setup, it is not supposed to start chirping unless it is out of range of your phone for at least 8 days, and not in one of the predefined geofence regions you can setup where it won't chirp.
I have them on tons of my devices, including my kids personal items that go to school, etc. and they never chirp, and I can and have found items that were misplaced in public locations (but not actually stolen).
>it is not supposed to start chirping unless it is out of range of your phone for at least 8 days, and not in one of the predefined geofence regions you can setup where it won't chirp.
Does it even chirp then? This is news to me, I have an airtag in my car and have certainly left it for 2 weeks during vacations. I've never heard the airtag chirp unless I make it play a sound through "Find My"
> There is something wrong with your configuration/setup
Something is off for sure, but it's not like there are any user-configurable parts here. I literally just threw it in the trunk - and it's not like there's a right and a wrong way to do it. :-)
I guess it's because I don't have a garage and my car is parked in a carport, about ~100 feet/~30 meters away from my apartment, so it "normally" doesn't sense my phone "nearby". Then, I suspect, when I walk down and sit in the car (which takes just a minute or two) there is not enough time for it to reconnect with the phone and realize the owner is around. Because an AirTag on my wallet doesn't do this. But that's just my guess - I'm too lazy to pull an SDR and listen to the radio traffic to confirm.
I have an AirTag in wallet. Every month or so it will chirp for no obvious reason. My phone might be with me, or upstairs, or whatever. It's just random.
No, they have been rendered useless for that purpose through software updates because of the almost 100% overlap of the use cases of 1) stalking someone 2) and tracking a thief.
I think you can still thread the needle. The cases are identical except for one situation--if the air tag is difficult to find or remove.
If you can't find or remove the air tag, then the option you have left to not be tracked is to separate yourself from the tracked thing. In the case of someone being stalked, that's inconvenient (that doesn't do it justice, but not really important to my point). In the case of someone who stole something, that's actually the desired outcome.
Imagine a situation where you get in a car and a few minutes later it says there's an air tag following you.
If you're being stalked... you can drive straight to a mechanic who can take all the time they need to find it, take a taxi over to the police and report it, etc.
If you just stole that car, now you know you're on the clock. Once someone's looking for you and that vehicle, there's a really good chance they're going to find it. You can take it to a mechanic, but a reputable mechanic might have some questions. You can try a less reputable mechanic, but they're gonna be pissed when the cops come knocking asking about the stolen car sitting over there and you might not be going back there any time soon. So if you can't find and remove the air tag relatively quickly, what options do you have left? Probably makes more sense to abandon the vehicle and try another one with a lower risk of winding up in jail.
I _know_ where the air tag is in my suitcase and it would take me tools and ~15 minutes to remove. How long is someone going to spend at that versus just tossing it?
>Are AirTags actually useful for anti-theft purposes?
For small items where the airtag is merely present, it can be useful from the perspective of being alerted when an item is left behind or taken away from your surroundings. Much theft crime is opportunistic, such as forgetting a wallet behind in a restaurant, or dropping it in a street. Airtags are useful in that regard as the "left behind" alerts are reasonably timely, and tracking an item down works well. This works because you realise it's gone and find it before someone else does.
While there are still plenty of examples of people using airtags for recovery of stolen goods, that's not the main product intention as it is very easy to discover and disable a loose airtag. Some larger items however (e.g. certain bikes) have airtags built in which aren't easily disabled, there are also mounting cages which serve a similar purpose - in these circumstances it is a legitimate antitheft device because the ability to easily disable it is removed.
I use airtags and my most common use of it is to ask siri to "jingle my keys", which alerts me to whichever coat or pair of jeans I've left them in (my second most common use is receiving an alert that I've left my umbrella behind somewhere).
I also remember one occasion of leaving my keys in a taxi, realising immediately, and chasing it down the road - the taxi never saw me, and I never saw my keys again, with an airtag that would have played out differently. These kinds of situations are far more common than dealing with thievery.
Not a bad price, but it does require an existing Airtag.
Ten years is a very long time in tech. I wouldn't be confident that the Airtag protocol will be functioning in 2035, and there are already rumors of a new Airtag and possibly a newer protocol coming up.
Its really easy for them, and this also in line how they would operate:
Add a new Airtag v2 protocol to the next iPhone and sell new Airtags only using that protocol. Why should you buy them? They could have different improvements you would like.
Start deprecating Airtag v1 in 3-4 years - and only sell new ones. There are now 3-4 iPhone generations that can handle the new version.
The next iPhone in 6-7 years doesn't support Airtags v1 anymore as it is obsolete now for many years.
Voila, they killed Airtags v1 in less than 10 years without killing the entire product line by switching to a new version. Is that unrealistic? No, thats their normal way how they deprecate stuff. It still works but only with old hardware or by not getting new updates anymore (iOS, macOS).
If the product line stops making sense or enough money they'll kill it. They're no Google, but it won't be the first product line that goes belly up.
The best scenario would be an industry standard that is widely more interesting than AirTags and works around the current compromises, letting Apple expand support to a wider audience. E.g. if the stalking problem had an elegant solution.
They are coming up on 4 years old. I have quite a number of them and do have to replace batteries frequently enough that it can get annoying.
I'm sure Apple will innovate and come up with something newer/better/etc at some point. But it's unlikely the gen1 devices will go away anytime soon. Even if the real life is only... 5 years, that still saves a number of battery changes for devices that maybe you don't want to deal with regularly.
And with the fact that Apple had enough demand to increase the limit from 16 to 32 per account ( https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/12/airtag-limit/ ). Clearly people have bought into the ecosystem in a big way. 30 Airtags * $25 each is $750. I don't think they'll decommission the gen1 system anytime soon with that much investment. Plus Apple is surprisingly good at supporting their hardware for a reasonable amount of time. The iPhone XR from 2018 is still supported by iOS 18.
Well, they certainly _might_ be functioning in ten years from now. Conservatively, you get 5 years of use out of this, which isn't bad for $15-20, depending on your use case.
AirTags use the same Find My protocol that's been out for years before them, I doubt Apple will cut them off. They also get regular software updates, so the hardware should last that.
While Apple products become obsolete, they are not exactly killed. i.e. your 15 year old macbook still functions but is limited. The air tag is a bit different because deprecating the protocol essentially kills it completely.
I highly doubt they do that unless they are remove airtags completely from their product line.
If you could disable the public key rotation on the AirTag, presumably you could greatly extend its battery life at the cost of your own privacy. When your battery gets low, Apple warns that "privacy protection is temporarily adjusted, AirTag may be traceable over Bluetooth". Wish I could enable this behavior in certain situations to extend the life.
(Or hook up an oversized external battery like this one, but tune the voltage to ~2V so it always looks like a nearly depleted CR2032 battery!)
I doubt that key rotation is a significant contributor to energy use. Energy spent doing RF (transmitting) plus energy spent sleeping will account for over 90 % of the energy use.
The size and cost of this unit and the AirTag to put in it get close, but not quite to, the size and cost of a cellular asset tracker. Roughly $30 more to get into a reputable brand asset tracker.
The promised ten-year life is better than the e.g. 4-year life you can get out of a GPS/LTE NB-IOT with lithium primary cell and deep sleep, and with fewer compromises around tesponsiveness to commands (primary-battery asset trackers are usually waking up like once every 6 hours). Still, standalone asset trackers have a number of features that make them more suitable for theft scenarios than airtags, not least of which is the absence of the anti-stalking feature of airtags which means they're never really a concealable option.
The major difference left is consumer-friendliness... Most asset trackers are provided by vendors with pretty hefty ongoing fees, and more oriented towards commercial customers like fleet operators and construction. Big difference in ease of purchase and use. It does make you wonder about the market for a really consumer-friendly solution, though.
What's the cheapest monthly fee I can get on an asset tracker with some confidence that it'll still be operating in 4 years when the batteries run out?
If I had to guess, they had easier access to a CNC or someone with CNC skills vs a shop that could get them rolled screws in the right size within their timeframe.
The 'nice' thing about CNC screws is that it's cheaper to do short runs. (which, on the military side, can help on some 'security by obscurity' lengths for revers engineering).
That said Rolled screws are almost always gonna be better unless the die is fucked.
I had the exact same thought. The screws are recessed, so knurling is unimportant. I love the idea and will buy some for the cars but give me a stainless m5, hex cap head screw, I don’t care about the process.
Well, it is ambiguous enough of a statement that it could be both. Maybe rolled threads and CNC lathe finish on the head... to make it look nice? Rolled threads are stronger anyway. Zooming in, it does look like there's turning marks on the head of the screws.
Readit News
Why didn't they replace the battery when the app complained?
How long would a thief really keep the AirTag anyway?
If the thief did keep the AirTag and you tracked them down, then what? A confrontation has a fairly high chance to have a worse result than losing some equipment. You could try to get the police to do it, but that's going to take more time, during which the thief is even more likely to ditch the AirTag.
Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device. They're really for something lost, not stolen. Generally, they are specifically designed to not work well in adversarial situations.
Dead Comment
So I say, shine on you crazy air tag tracking vigilante diamonds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strate...
If you relativelly fit, and have some experience with actual fights or training in martial arts, it is not that stupid to try to recover your stuff.
If you don't feel confortable with the prospect of any kind of violent confrontation or don't have the street smarts to evaluate the risk potential of saidconfrontation, you'd still have the hope that the police would do something anyway if you have the location of your goods.
Really, at some time we need to stop glorifying cowardice and reclaim a little bit of dignity.
I mostly agree. I don't think its cowardice most of the time though. Its that laws now favor criminals if you attempt to do anything yourself. Its become public policy that "rich" people buying things can simply absorb the loss and the police don't even have to do anything because no one bothers to report it. The police win because crime stats go down, thiefs win because they get the goods, the victim absorbs all the cost and if they try to do anything the victim goes to jail for whatever charges that made the police have to get up and work.
And getting into a physical fight with real injury potential because of an item?
If it is a cheap thing it is not worth it. If it is more expensive usually the law is on your side. Either way, there's no need for physical confrontation.
> the reason he resort to this kind of criminal activity is preciselly because he is not ready for the violent potential of more profitable criminal activities.
That's a gamble. What if the reason is that, although the thief _could_ be violent, they were smart enough to realize that they can get more results with less personal risk? In which case, your 'martial arts' training is meaningless when you have a knife or a bullet going through you.
Anyone with actual experience will tell you that no amount of training will save you from the lucky stab/shot/unknown. Sure, you might win 9/10 times, but is that worth it? Sometimes maybe, other times no. Usually it's better to notify police and let the system handle it. If you handle it yourself, the system in many jurisdictions will fuck you just as bad as the real criminal unless you actively witnessed it or were attacked first.
I knew a guy that tried to stop someone from stealing his neighbor's car stereo.
He was extremely fit, young, and a fighter.
That didn't stop him from getting stabbed to death by the thief.
You can decide your life is worth a $100 car stereo, but I know mine is worth more than that.
Most people are not this
> have some experience with actual fights or training in martial arts
And significant amounts of people also have neither of these things. At the very least “martial arts” training is particularly unlikely.
I’m the only one I know in my circle with practical fight experience and it’s because I grew up in shitty places. That probably says more about the privileged area I now live, and the kinds of people it attract though to be fair.
And yeah maybe any reasonable human can beat up most tweakers, but one could have a knife or gun. Even if that’s a 5% shot, my life is worth more than 20x my bike.
Dead Comment
However, an AirTag attached to my keys _should_ be small and it's easily accessible so I don't mind swapping the battery as needed.
- These are going to be huge with boats and canoes
- Toolboxes owned by professional builders, carpenters, plumbers
- Important crates in self-storage centers.
- Museums
- Film sets (think big $200k cameras)
Worst case scenario I report it to police directly and it tells them exactly where it is.
If something is stolen, if I don't know where it is that makes the problem 10x worse. At the very least the airtag shows where that item is (unless it has been found and thrown away).
https://skunklock.com/
Yes, and then wait 6 months for the police to get around to picking it up ...
During the most recent American election I saw at least three news stories on television about campaign sign thieves being tracked down through the use of AirTags put in one of the signs. To my surprise, in each case the police were right there, and in two of the cases, the signs were still loaded in the thieves' cars. So it does seem to work.
Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device.
They aren't anti-theft devices as in padlocks. But the more often that thieves start wondering if the thing they're taking might have an AirTag in it, they might start reconsidering some of the petty thefts.
It's like a surveillance camera. A camera, itself, can't stop a crime. But the possibility that someone's watching can act as a mild deterrent.
It's good for society, and (in the evolutionary equilibrium) results in massively reduced defection, if people are willing to take on high risk to aggressively punish defectors.
you discover something has been stolen (or lost), and not knowing exactly when it happened but curious about that too, you immediately try to look up where it was last seen and if it's still tracking. What's the problem with that scenario, sounds perfectly reasonable.
he wants the long battery not because the thief is going to carry it around for 10 years, but simply so that it will more likely to be charged and location tracking at the time it is stolen from the owner.
Unless you're ignoring/suppressing the low battery notifications for months, that's already overwhelmingly likely.
- To change a battery, you need to not only see the notification but also be physically proximal to the device and have a fresh battery available. It can take some time to meet all these conditions and sometimes you simply forget.
- A single air tag only needs the battery replaced roughly every six months. However, the rate of replacements increases as you are managing more air tags. It's easy to be replacing a battery every few weeks.
- Replacement fatigue is a thing. At some point, we just get lazy.
I keep my BBQ on my front patio, directly in front of my battery-powered Ring camera. The battery on that camera needs to be recharged and replaced every two months. I try to get to it as quickly as I can - ideally during the low-battery state and before the battery dies completely. One time, however, I got lazy/forgot. Two days after the battery died, my BBQ was stolen.
Re: antitheft device
You're right. Apple markets AirTags for recovering lost items, not stolen ones. Nevertheless, they can be very effective for recovering stolen items. My local police department will aid in recovering stolen property. If the item has an AirTag that pings a location, an officer will investigate. In the case of my BBQ, the officer was willing to look for it same-day but, alas, I did not have an AirTag on it.
This product actually helps as it effectively hides the air tag. This makes it less likely that a thief would find and discard the airtag. They'd only be looking for it if their iPhone notifies them and, even then, they may not be able to discriminate which item contains the tag. Best case scenario: they discard the entire stolen unit, keeping the air tag with it.
I think it's also worth saying, these batteries aren't the standard AA batteries most people on hand, they're 2032 (I believe? or 2025) "quarter batteries" which isn't something a lot of people just keep around. So in addition to being physically proximal, once they've figured out how to open it up and being surprised by the "weird battery," they've also got to remember which it was when presented with a wall of similar looking "quarter batteries" at the store (see: my lack of assurity even having previously replaced these).
What you do with that information is a whole other topic outside this scope.
I've recovered or helped recover several stolen items located with an AirTag and I'll keep on buying them as long as they're good for both.
So far in the cases I've been involved, the thief wasn't aware of the AirTag. In some cases, they had iPhones on them. I'm not sure why they did not get an "AirTag is following you" notification, or why they ignored it.
I don't use the Apple ecosystem as my primary, but I do have a bunch of tags I use in different cases for different items. Some of my items are things like motorsports vehicles or trailers and other things that are around but often out of sight.
If something were to go missing I may not notice immediately. It also seems the batteries in AirTags die faster in areas where climate control isn't the norm. Changing these out every year is a pain because some are hidden in areas that aren't easy to get to.
I hope these work well. And I was pleasantly surprised by the price point. Already ordered!
Also... I already own ElevationLabs Surface Mounts that I use and they are well made products. I love finding brands like this because it's not the norm on outlets like Amazon anymore. So when I find a good product I'm more than happy to keep buying their products, the premium is worth it.
We’ve found the AirTags work just as well as LTE/4G GPS trackers —- with no-ongoing costs, better battery life (we get 6-9 months on the AirTags, 4-6 weeks on the GPS trackers), and AirTags are 1/5 the cost of an LTE tracker.
This product would work well for us.
because life gets in the way. You have a bunch of batteries and forget where you put them, or you walk inside and get distracted.
I have a tag in my suitcase, which is/has run out of battery. I dont use it that often, so I should really replace it. but I have forgotten.
We recently recovered a laptop simply because it was tracked. Took the location to the police and they did the rest. It’s most definitely an anti-theft device in my case
Air Tags are also concealable, and on my backpack I have one inside the strap. You can’t tell it is there.
Many people routinely clear out all notifications due to the noise, and Find My notifications are part of that.
Dead Comment
Also, thieves are dumb. Don't expect them to find all the tracking devices in minutes.
Maybe. I agree it's a risk I'd ask myself more than a few times if I'm willing to take these days, but in my youth and when I was less economically secure I never had a problem taking matters like these into my own hands.
Every time I've tracked down a stolen item (phones were the most common with early tracking apps, but before that I've gone after stolen bikes, Discmans, etc.) the thief simply gave up the item without so much as a verbal altercation. The surprise that someone was crazy enough to call them on their bullshit was enough to shock them into just complying. Perhaps some shame as well, I'm not certain.
This has been true since my early teen days when I worked for a small retail store where the owner was way crazier than I ever have been. He took me along on some "repo" trips where folks had written bad checks against expensive items. These were generally in bad neighborhoods and I was certain he was going to get shot - but he never did. Some yelling was the most I witnessed and every time we got the items in question back safe and sound - usually with the person in question helping to load them into the truck.
I'd probably still track an item down and knock on someone's door if I was confident it was the correct location. These days it's basically your only recourse, and despite the relatively minor economic loss vs. my income at this point in my life I think it's important for societal reasons. When everyone simply gives up and lets the criminals and petty thieves "win" without so much as challenging on them, society rapidly crumbles. Relying on law enforcement is a last resort, even though the modern day take is they are the front line response. We see how well that is going. Poorly.
If I owned a retail shop I'd also confront any shoplifters and back up any of my staff who decided to do the same themselves. I understand this might end up costing me more money and make insurance difficult. Punishing such behavior for "liability" reasons is utterly asinine. It should be rewarded, but not encouraged or forced on employees by ownership. When I stopped shoplifters in the 90's at the shops I worked at, it wasn't because I thought my low pay was worth the personal risk. I did it because it was the right thing to do and I knew the owners had my back if anything bad happened. Firing clerks for giving a damn about society is one of my huge pet peeves of modern life. And yes, I am well aware of the risk and horrible outcomes that rarely happen in such situations.
So tldr; I see it as a duty to society to make an attempt at challenging these things for myself and friends that ask for help. Yes, that does incur some personal risk to my safety that cannot be squared with the economic reward. It's a tradeoff I, and others, have calculated for ourselves.
It's utterly corrosive to actual hard working folks doing the right thing to be forced to watch some asshole professional thief push out a cart full of power tools from Home Depot. Knowing full well that they would be fired if they so much got in the way of the cart. It's ridiculous we've normalized such things and justified it with the liability fairy. The executive class has entirely failed society on this point. If someone wants to take on the personal risk, the response should be high praise - not punishment. You get more of what you incentivize.
Some of the petty thieves will think twice if they hear about other thieves getting beat up. Many of them will simply respond with violence.
Look at Latin American countries where thieves will shoot you dead for an iPhone.
The bicycle thieves are going to steal no matter what. They have to score their next hit. Better that they can do that armed only with an angle grinder rather than a pistol, too.
And if someone decides to turn a bicycle theft into a murder, well, the bicycle thief can usually "live off the land" much easier than you can. When you are used to living on the street and all you need is your next hit, it's much harder to catch you for murder, even if you can be identified.
In a fight where you have more to lose, are an order of magnitude more likely to be held accountable, and your opponent is irrational, effectively anonymous, and probably more practiced in violence than you, escalation seems unfavorable even if it leaves you with a shitty feeling.
https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-cr2032-dummy.html
Of course, I get it from Apple's perspective, they dont want AirTags to be used to tail others. However, that precludes it from being used for theft tracking.
For example, I use an AirTag on my bicycle. If someone steals the bicycle, they are literally informed "an air tag is following you" https://support.apple.com/en-us/119874
There are a lot of things I'd love to put long-term AirTags on (luggage, snow-blower, childrens' backpacks) but if theft isnt really deterred, then the case for a bulkier AirTag is quite reduced.
They'd rather make AirTags less generally useful than make them both more generally useful + open to stalking occurrences and lawsuits.
Of course I'm not saying Apple shouldn't try to protect people from stalkers using their control over their products, I just don't see why it would make Appld responsible if someone misused their products.
- Me or other people need to be around (since airtags jump off others' devices)
This removes use cases like tracking lost marine goods, tracking lost drones, etc.
- Item being tracked has to be big enough to be worth the extra size/weight of the long life battery wrapper
This removes most common use cases like wallets, remotes, etc.
- Item being tracked has to be something you actually lose w/o wrongdoing. Makes sense for backpacks, purses, parked cars.
But, most capital equipment wouldnt be "lost" it would be stolen, so that is out.
https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/20-surprisingly-practical...
I use an AirTag on my e-bike - there’s quite a few hidden mounts out there that look like normal rear reflectors or slot in between a water bottle cage and the bike frame. It’s also trivially easy to pop the AirTag open and remove the speaker so it can’t beep.
I bought my AirTags before there were any compatible third party options, but the non-Apple AirTags don’t have the UWB chip inside and don’t support the precision finding feature which would also make them more difficult to find.
> Of course, I get it from Apple's perspective, they dont want AirTags to be used to tail others.
I'm also not a fan of having to go back to Apple and pay a fee for "battery service", when the current fix is a CR2032 battery that's under $1.
Isn't that too late? If you disabled that AirTag with your phone, you are probably the thief. Now we got you fully I.D.ed.
It seems that the safest bet, for a thief/criminal, is to not take any iPhone (or phone) on him while committing the crime.
These won’t inform, I believe.
Also, thieves are dumb.
I threw one in the trunk of my car (just in case - I ordered a 4-pack and I had a spare one), and every single time I drive somewhere it chirps loudly when I'm exiting my driveway, making its presence immediately obvious without any delays, and despite my phone being with me in the car.
Nearly all my hardside cases have an airtag stuffed in one of the "Surface Mount" kits from ElevationLab. it looks like a pressure valve on the other side, and I might replace them with Security mounts if I'm really worried. Having those was a FANTASTIC way to track my cases as I left them with a (trusted) friend to be shipped along some other Very High Value gear. Being able to see what was going on (and know when it had reached its destination) was invaluable. On the way back, I could see my luggage as it slugged its way through the airport luggage handling system. It's not real-time but good enough for rough location.
A friend of mine was able to locate their stolen vehicle down to the block and then drone-find the vehicle from there, call the cops, and ended up busting an interstate chop shop in the process. The AirTag consistently got gasps of updates from passing vehicles and the neighbor's HomePod.
All this because she had hidden an airtag in the gas cap.
There are airlines that are encouraging people to put airtags/tiles/samsung trackers on their checked luggage because it helps them keep the airport handlers in check. A prime example of this is flying with guns (yes, you can fly with guns!) and how having an airtag made it EASIER to recover the firearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHyb2amIkzo (This happened AGAIN, by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBngUc3rmY0 -- Yes, airlines are TERRIBLE about handling these things!)
That same company also makes the 10 year AirTag battery. I am surprised that no one has released a 3D model to print. It would be popular with DIYers.
They'd rather do anything than pay airport handlers better lol
I have them on tons of my devices, including my kids personal items that go to school, etc. and they never chirp, and I can and have found items that were misplaced in public locations (but not actually stolen).
Does it even chirp then? This is news to me, I have an airtag in my car and have certainly left it for 2 weeks during vacations. I've never heard the airtag chirp unless I make it play a sound through "Find My"
Something is off for sure, but it's not like there are any user-configurable parts here. I literally just threw it in the trunk - and it's not like there's a right and a wrong way to do it. :-)
I guess it's because I don't have a garage and my car is parked in a carport, about ~100 feet/~30 meters away from my apartment, so it "normally" doesn't sense my phone "nearby". Then, I suspect, when I walk down and sit in the car (which takes just a minute or two) there is not enough time for it to reconnect with the phone and realize the owner is around. Because an AirTag on my wallet doesn't do this. But that's just my guess - I'm too lazy to pull an SDR and listen to the radio traffic to confirm.
If you can't find or remove the air tag, then the option you have left to not be tracked is to separate yourself from the tracked thing. In the case of someone being stalked, that's inconvenient (that doesn't do it justice, but not really important to my point). In the case of someone who stole something, that's actually the desired outcome.
Imagine a situation where you get in a car and a few minutes later it says there's an air tag following you.
If you're being stalked... you can drive straight to a mechanic who can take all the time they need to find it, take a taxi over to the police and report it, etc.
If you just stole that car, now you know you're on the clock. Once someone's looking for you and that vehicle, there's a really good chance they're going to find it. You can take it to a mechanic, but a reputable mechanic might have some questions. You can try a less reputable mechanic, but they're gonna be pissed when the cops come knocking asking about the stolen car sitting over there and you might not be going back there any time soon. So if you can't find and remove the air tag relatively quickly, what options do you have left? Probably makes more sense to abandon the vehicle and try another one with a lower risk of winding up in jail.
I _know_ where the air tag is in my suitcase and it would take me tools and ~15 minutes to remove. How long is someone going to spend at that versus just tossing it?
For small items where the airtag is merely present, it can be useful from the perspective of being alerted when an item is left behind or taken away from your surroundings. Much theft crime is opportunistic, such as forgetting a wallet behind in a restaurant, or dropping it in a street. Airtags are useful in that regard as the "left behind" alerts are reasonably timely, and tracking an item down works well. This works because you realise it's gone and find it before someone else does.
While there are still plenty of examples of people using airtags for recovery of stolen goods, that's not the main product intention as it is very easy to discover and disable a loose airtag. Some larger items however (e.g. certain bikes) have airtags built in which aren't easily disabled, there are also mounting cages which serve a similar purpose - in these circumstances it is a legitimate antitheft device because the ability to easily disable it is removed.
I use airtags and my most common use of it is to ask siri to "jingle my keys", which alerts me to whichever coat or pair of jeans I've left them in (my second most common use is receiving an alert that I've left my umbrella behind somewhere).
I also remember one occasion of leaving my keys in a taxi, realising immediately, and chasing it down the road - the taxi never saw me, and I never saw my keys again, with an airtag that would have played out differently. These kinds of situations are far more common than dealing with thievery.
Deleted Comment
Ten years is a very long time in tech. I wouldn't be confident that the Airtag protocol will be functioning in 2035, and there are already rumors of a new Airtag and possibly a newer protocol coming up.
Add a new Airtag v2 protocol to the next iPhone and sell new Airtags only using that protocol. Why should you buy them? They could have different improvements you would like.
Start deprecating Airtag v1 in 3-4 years - and only sell new ones. There are now 3-4 iPhone generations that can handle the new version.
The next iPhone in 6-7 years doesn't support Airtags v1 anymore as it is obsolete now for many years.
Voila, they killed Airtags v1 in less than 10 years without killing the entire product line by switching to a new version. Is that unrealistic? No, thats their normal way how they deprecate stuff. It still works but only with old hardware or by not getting new updates anymore (iOS, macOS).
The best scenario would be an industry standard that is widely more interesting than AirTags and works around the current compromises, letting Apple expand support to a wider audience. E.g. if the stalking problem had an elegant solution.
I'm sure Apple will innovate and come up with something newer/better/etc at some point. But it's unlikely the gen1 devices will go away anytime soon. Even if the real life is only... 5 years, that still saves a number of battery changes for devices that maybe you don't want to deal with regularly.
And with the fact that Apple had enough demand to increase the limit from 16 to 32 per account ( https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/12/airtag-limit/ ). Clearly people have bought into the ecosystem in a big way. 30 Airtags * $25 each is $750. I don't think they'll decommission the gen1 system anytime soon with that much investment. Plus Apple is surprisingly good at supporting their hardware for a reasonable amount of time. The iPhone XR from 2018 is still supported by iOS 18.
Well, they certainly _might_ be functioning in ten years from now. Conservatively, you get 5 years of use out of this, which isn't bad for $15-20, depending on your use case.
I'd agree if it were any company other than Apple. And if Apple goes under by 2035 then AirTags will be the least of our concern.
Deleted Comment
I highly doubt they do that unless they are remove airtags completely from their product line.
(Or hook up an oversized external battery like this one, but tune the voltage to ~2V so it always looks like a nearly depleted CR2032 battery!)
Source: I'm in a similar industry
The promised ten-year life is better than the e.g. 4-year life you can get out of a GPS/LTE NB-IOT with lithium primary cell and deep sleep, and with fewer compromises around tesponsiveness to commands (primary-battery asset trackers are usually waking up like once every 6 hours). Still, standalone asset trackers have a number of features that make them more suitable for theft scenarios than airtags, not least of which is the absence of the anti-stalking feature of airtags which means they're never really a concealable option.
The major difference left is consumer-friendliness... Most asset trackers are provided by vendors with pretty hefty ongoing fees, and more oriented towards commercial customers like fleet operators and construction. Big difference in ease of purchase and use. It does make you wonder about the market for a really consumer-friendly solution, though.
I'm sure standard rolled screws would be just fine...
The 'nice' thing about CNC screws is that it's cheaper to do short runs. (which, on the military side, can help on some 'security by obscurity' lengths for revers engineering).
That said Rolled screws are almost always gonna be better unless the die is fucked.