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.
File a police report, go through the right channels. If you know its yours, call the police department non-emergency and explain the situation
In my jurisdiction in the US it doesn’t matter if someone purchased the stolen goods or not, the goods still belong to the owner. This is sometimes called the "nemo dat" rule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_dat_quod_non_habet
The person buying the stolen goods would need to file a claim against the thief to recover their money, but the goods still belong to the original owner. And this is how it should be, since it’s added reason not to buy goods you suspect are stolen.
And yes, you should always try and work with the police first and foremost.
IIRC, they had a security hole on their payment page: they forgot to implement SCA (strong customer authentification, aka 2FA for payments). Had they done this, the liability would have shifted onto the bank/card issuer. For some reason they decided to go after the customers in vain resentment, were acquired and their product was discontinued.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nuraphone/comments/8iw3he/beware_on...
> however, in many cases, more than one innocent party is involved, making judgment difficult for courts and leading to numerous exceptions to the general rule that aim to give a degree of protection to bona fide purchasers and original owners
> The person buying the stolen goods would need to file a claim against the thief to recover their money
Generally as long as the purchase is made in good faith, you are wrong. It is the original owner that needs to file a claim against the thief.
Obviously, what constitutes a sale in "good faith" is a rather imprecise science, although one steady element is the sales price: it needs to have been appropriate for the item. So for example a mint bicycle or antique coin should sell near sticker price.
The next sentence is:
> The possession of the good of title will be with the original owner.
So you seem to be wrong there. The innocent buyer needs to file a claim against the thief, the original owner retails their title. It is explained in more detail later on.
The reason for this is so that if you buy a bicycle at, say, a bicycle fair and for a reasonable price, you shouldn’t have to worry about it being yoinked from under you later on.
Lawmakers have clarified this is choosing between two evils, there is no winning proposition here.
So, in conclusion: the original owner needs to file the claim, not the third party.
As anyone who has gone to law school will tell you, you can only acquire the title that the seller has. If seller stole the goods, he doesn't have any title, so he can't transfer title to a subsequent buyer. See, e.g. UCC § 2-403
There are exceptions when it comes to those who have voidable title (thieves do not have voidable title).
There are also cases where courts have more or less created exceptions close to those OP has described. For example, if Best Buy receives some stolen merchandise and sells it to good faith purchasers, courts have held that the victim needs to pursue the thief/Best Buy, not the end purchaser.
But generally, OP is wrong: if you buy a stolen bike at a flea market, you don't get title and the owner can get the bike back. Think of the policy implications if the rule was as OP claims. All thieves would have to do is immediately sell stolen goods and the owners could never get them back. That would be absurd.
You never asked.
https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0005291/2024-05-01 article 83 onward
> As anyone who has gone to law school will tell you
Sounds like you wasted $300 000 just to be wrong :)
> But generally, OP is wrong: if you buy a stolen bike at a flea market, you don't get title and the owner can get the bike back.
I said bike fair, not flea market.
I will reiterate: the sale needs to have been in good faith. All the conditions for that need to have been met.
"Our" legal system? Do you mean all common law countries or a particular one?
Not sure how US courts have interpreted this requirement but that’s the onus and I believe it rests on the third party buyer (to show absence of knowledge through evidence).
In that case the claim is against the thief only.
i hope that isn't true. A buyer of stolen goods needs to accept that a consequence of it is that they could lose possession of said good. This is why for expensive goods, you should ensure you're not buying stolen goods.
It is logical that it works that way. Proving something is owned by someone else can be quite hard for certain items.
I know it’s false in the UK and I’d imagine it is false in any country where the law is based on UK law.
Failing to retrieve it at the time is going to mean losing it forever. If you find a crackhead with your phone and wait for someone else to retrieve it, that phone is long gone.
A bunch of the other suggestions, here on HN Streetwise ProTips, can get self and/or friends beaten, stabbed, and/or arrested.
Not saying confronting thieves is for everyone. But it's not necessarily as physical as you think.
Where I live the basic law/constitution establishes a protection duty of its citizens by the state (this includes their property). The police is one of the ways the state takes care of this duty. If the state is grossly negligent in this or even does nothing at all, the state may very well be on the hook to make the injured party whole. This responsibility is passed down and carried by individual police officers, and there have been cases of police officers being personally convicted of causing bodily harm for not dispatching a unit after a request for aid (despite them not personally swinging any punches)[1].
Generally you'll have police show up for near anything if they can.
[1] https://www.wz.de/panorama/nach-notruf-keine-streife-geschic...
During COVID, I called the non emergency line police for a break in on my car parked on the street and the police showed up in minutes then searched the area frantically to see if the guy was still around.
I don’t know if they are over funded or just bored.
For the vast majority of people who live in reasonable cities, calling the police for something like that will get a timely response.
Many larger cities don't have the budget to provide adequate police coverage. So you get this sort of "best effort" response.
This is made worse with recent years of "defund the police" policies creeping into some of our larger cities.
It just reinforces the Pro 2A community's saying - when seconds matter, help is just minutes away.
If you talk to them in person, it should be to get an idea of what they'll do, which may or may not have something to do with what's legal.
If you want legal advice, ask a lawyer with experience in the relevant area.
Probably they will verify that the bike is yours, and retrieve it, or they will say that they don't have the resources.
Are people imagining that the police will say that you can go take the bike, but then turn around and arrest you for theft?
Of course, if the police tell you "finders keepers; it's in the Constitution", then you can seek legal advice.
People are imagining the police will tell you that you can't steal it back, when legally you can.
After all, it's the police's job to keep the peace. And things are more peaceful if I'm not busting up thieves' hideouts all guns blazing like Rambo.
Entrapment is reserved for the police going above and beyond, eg "sell me meth or I'll kill your dog" where it can be argued that the entrapped normally would not do the crime.
I still wouldn’t be very excited to try this defense in court.
Working with that suspicion, especially given that this is HN, police saying "don't go steal it back" might still be very good advice, regardless of legal right.
For example (referring back to a scenario earlier in thread), I'm imagining a techbro crew, all jumping into one of their Teslas, and rolling up on misguided urban youth turf.
There's already a lot of misunderstanding and animosity, both ways, between stereotypes. And someone's attempt at "show of force" just escalated it. So, who will escalate the stupid further, and stab or draw a gun first.
Police don’t usually investigate petty crimes.
the police will give you any advice, good or bad. They're not legally responsible for anything they said to you, as long as they're not telling you to commit a crime (in which case, if they did they will deny it).
You can still call 'em up of course - but don't 100% just trust their words blindly.
"We cannot answer legal questions, please seek a lawyer for advise."
I don't do anything terribly interesting, so this was almost certainly not an issue actually worth paying $200 for a lawyer to answer.
It's great that you think _someone will handle that for you_ but it is probably a fantasy. Unfortunately you will probably need to self resolve. If you think it is going to escalate to violence, bring overwhelming force.
Crime Alert
THEFT OF BICYCLE
AT THIS NEIGHBOURHOOD
ON 20 MARCH 2013 @ 7 AM
Witnesses, please call Tanglin Police Division
(phone number redacted)
> Police to give out free air tag tracking devices to combat rise in stolen vehicles
https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/police-to-give-out-f...
it's a nice bit of propaganda that they're there for us, but I urge anyone with that idea to seek out and research the history and origins of the modern police.
hint : in the US they first emerged as 'slave patrols', and then later modernized into 'industrial labor controls', and things weren't all that much better across the ocean in London with Sir Robert Peel and his version of the 'police service'.
> in the US they first emerged as 'slave patrols'
> Sir Robert Peel and his version of the 'police service'
I assume that prior to the "modern" police, policing was still necessary, since there were lawbreakers and troublemakers since time immemorial. What do you regard as the substantive difference between the pre-modern police force and the modern? Did the former somehow serve "all of us" better than the latter?
That led to extremely selective enforcement at the best of times.
The idea of a professional, independent force that served the public and preferred formal laws was the innovation.
Previously you’d need to either deal with it yourself, or track down a local patron and hope they cared enough to assign some muscle to deal with it on your behalf - and didn’t favor the perp more. Think ‘Godfather’. In those cases, written law was rarely a priority either.
So stealing your own thing back without the police involved may technically be illegal, but practically if the airtag tells you where your stolen bike is and you have the keys, skip the police and take it. Nothing will happen. The thief or their client is not going to call the police since that gets them arrested or fined.
Of course you can't go into the thief's house to retrieve your things. Then you do need to call the police first. But the one case I know about someone doing that for a stolen iPhone based on Find My app location, the police showed up quickly and arrested the thief + found lots of other stolen things in their possession.
If you buy something that was stolen, the original owner has the right to get it back without compensation to you.
More broadly I think it does make a certain sort of sense that a theft should be resolved by the police. Find your item and want it back? Get the police involved. It's just that these days we're all so used the police being completely ineffectual that taking matters into your own hands is the only "sensible" solution.
In reality things are not so stiff. My dads bag was stolen from the train. The thief was apprehended on the station. He got his bag back from the cops because it had identifiable information in it. Perhaps a bit light on evidence that the thief was not the owner, but it's not always overly complicated. I think the thief got the right nudge.
A fun thought experiment is that in the time you might have left your car parked in the street, it might be stolen, sold bona fide, then (by happenstance) parked in the same area, so one day you just go back to it and drive it away.
I guess in a more practical sense, you could claim that's (more or less) what happened after recovering your possessions after having them stolen... what would happen in that edge case?
Does not change anything. I mean poor guy, became a victim of a fraudster, but what does my bike have to do with it?
>you cannot repurpose the product yourself
This is not repurposing, this is its prevention.
>solutions of real world capitalist conundrums
There is no conundrums, it is pure tyranny.
So I say, shine on you crazy air tag tracking vigilante diamonds.
That must mean something different than I am imagining.
When you buy a new F-150, a Persian guard cat is an even more essential add-on than a bed liner.
I have 3 removed cats in the toolbox of my truck, which I don’t lock, and neither they nor the truck have been touched.
I even loaned the truck out to a rando on Facebook marketplace when I gave a fridge away, for free. Truck and cats came back
Btw, in case this is relevant: if you have a 1st gen Tacoma, never sell that thing. Still miss that truck.
The danger is about the pointy shape.
I'd be careful climbing it, if you fall/slip it's way worse than barbed wire. (Not sure how to do it tactically)
I don't think it's that unethical to put it around the cat if it's obvious. It might be a danger in an accident or something.
A mattress thrown over
I’m not sure that’s accurate. It may be true in large cities, but most people don’t live in NY or SF.
Yeah - the closest stat I can find works out to fewer than 2% of people per year are theft victims.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191247/reported-larceny-....
My point isn't that those number are exact. My point is 2% chance per year expands to a larger number over many years. So saying "most people have experienced theft" many not be that far off. 2% is 1 in 50 but 55% is more than 1 in 2. My personal experience is would be 10 or 11 in 55yrs depending on whether an attempt counts
bike, bike, bike, car radio, car radio, car radio, car, car radio, bike, camera/dashcam/kindle, attempt (broke window to check for loot but didn't find anything). Still cost $$$ to replace window so you could say my window was stolen.
Also I didn't just multiply by the number of years. The probably for 100yrs is 86% (not 100% and not 200%).
As an obviously extreme example, imagine a world where 98% the people live in zero-crime areas, and the rest live in places where they are robbed annually.
In such a world, the percentage of people who were a VOT in a single year would be 2%, and it would not rise as you broadened to multiple years. (The same 2% of people would be targeted over and over.)
This is all just a roundabout way of stating the unfortunate fact that some people live in bad areas.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience.
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.
Tbf, I am generally anti-police in the sense that they’re pretty institutionally bad at preventing or deterring crime in the current model, but I don’t really understand the argument you’re making here
Just google property crime + [any largeish US city] + reddit and youll find dozens of anecdotal stories from citizens.
Property crime seems to have essentially become a problem dealt with exclusively by citizens. Hell, SPD wouldnt even do anything to help when my car was stolen a few years ago. I got a call from the bar where it was abandoned and had to have it towed myself.
I think the argument GP was making was that of incentives. Police department have essentially zero incentive to devote time+manpower to petty theft or property crime, so the easiest solution is to simply encourage citizens to not 'resist' so to speak. If you get mugged, its a lot easier to deal with as a police officer if you simply hand them your wallet, vs starting a fist/knife/gun fight in the streets.
But I do know if you're a homeless drug addict and you commit a crime that makes the cops throw you in jail - that's three meals a day, somewhere warm to sleep, and no lost income because you didn't have any income.
Whereas if you're a member of the middle class and you commit the same crime and get thrown in the same jail? Mucho lost income, you can't pay your mortgage, you get fired for not showing up at work, and as a convict your employment prospects become much, much worse.
So a "rational" member of the middle class might opt not to fight a homeless drug addict over $500 simply because they've got a lot more to lose.
I don't know why people always parrot this like a fact. Plenty of prisons serve only two woefully inadequate meals a day (like, Fyre festival sandwich levels of inadequate) and prisons generally have atrocious climate control. In the southern states, they don't have air conditioning and it gets genuinely dangerous for the prisoners.
Some jurisdictions give the Warden a budget for feeding the prisoners, and any dollar they don't spend, they get to KEEP. This predictably results in malnourished prisoners, but Americans do not have the empathy to care most of the time.
I'd love a source on that.
That just reads like a general "this is why I'm a coward" excuse.
Also what you want is spelled "It's".
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.
Nahh, you just outsource your physical confrontation to a cop. You still belief in confrontation for resolving the issues, you’re just being a coward and not doing it yourself.
And I think it's better not to refer to strangers on the internet as cowards. How would you feel if somebody responded to your opinion by calling you a name?
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.
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.
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.
Really, at some time we need to stop glorifying cowardice and reclaim a little bit of dignity.
A lot of those thiefs are not hardened criminals
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.
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).
Yes, and then wait 6 months for the police to get around to picking it up ...
I live in a town. A few years ago, I had my car broken into with my bag and laptop stolen. Cops took fingerprints and forensics, found a match in a database, visited the suspect, arrested him (as he couldn't explain why his fingerprints was in my car), searched, found, and reclaimed my property.
Those guys probably went on to steal more shit from someone else.
Maybe my batteries die completely before the second notification triggers.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/cloudkit/cksubscri...
Apartment living can be hell when there are neighbours who don't replace their smoke detector batteries. I can't fathom how people can sleep through this loud annoying chirp every thirty seconds. I certainly find it hard and my apartment is far enough away that it's hard to determine where exactly the chirp is coming from.
The thought of smoke-detector like beeping of airtags all over the place gives me the worst kind of creeps. Please don't give them ideas! Please!
- 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).
Surely it's something that airtag owners keep around in bulk? I don't have any airtags/tiles/etc, but I can't imagine owning just one. As soon as I have one, I might as well have 6 or 12. If I'm replacing 2*n batteries per year, even if n is just 2 or 3, I'm buying these things in bulk!
This might be slightly tangent but I used to think that. Except now I have a kid. Do you have any idea how many crazy weird battery sizes some of these new toys take? I think I now have like 4 or 5 different sized button batteries in my inventory.
"Back in my day" everything was either AA, C or D. These days, that isn't the case anymore. Only "big things" take "big batteries" like AA->D or they have a few built-in 18650's and a generic charger onboard.
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.
in the story the guy told, his batteries were dead; he wishes they weren't. People are allowed to have different preferences, it's not a plot hole in the story.
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.
> They're really for something lost, not stolen. Generally, they are specifically designed to not work well in adversarial situations.
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.
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.
Air Tags are also concealable, and on my backpack I have one inside the strap. You can’t tell it is there.
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
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.
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.
Not really. "Survivorship bias" is just the HN cliché of the quarter, and doesn't apply in nearly as many situations as posters on this forum would like.
There were plenty of other stories of campaign signs being stolen, both in the most recent election, and in previous ones. I'd call it more "perception bias." You only know about the AirTag campaign signs stories because you're viewing it through the lens of HN, and not a broader view of media coverage of the issue.
Also, thieves are dumb. Don't expect them to find all the tracking devices in minutes.
Many people routinely clear out all notifications due to the noise, and Find My notifications are part of that.
It's a thing in Minneapolis, though the Kia Boys thing was still very real here, I don't know how much they've kept it up.
Kia tried to save itself a few bucks by drastically reducing their product's security. The fact that other cars aren't being stolen at nearly the same rate is itself good evidence that the thieves are just opportunists.
At the limit, the rule is always might makes right. Until then, the question is how much are you willing to give up to re-order the status quo? (A reordering that may or may not end up in your favor)
> the concept of that's not yours and is actually someone else's isn't the most compelling reason?
At its core, this concept is more of a truce where multiple parties agree that the costs of physical violence are not worth it, because the alternative is more acceptable. Hence the saying that “society is only 3 or 6 or 9 meals away from revolution”.
Of course, I can see you just wrote that as an indirect way to call me chicken (a bit timid yourself, no?), but can't you work out a better narrative considering the context?
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.
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.
If AirTags stopped notifying users they're being tracked, then AirTags would also be meant for tracking people.
What?? That's like by not including a sound device that screams "look out, you're being murdered!" on every hammer when it's swung, manufacturers are saying their hammers are also intended for murder.
Now that Apple has this feature, sure, removing it might raise some eyebrows, but the theft tracking use-case is so obvious and useful that no judge would ever believe that Apple did this specifically to enable stalking.
There's also no reasonable standard by which you can claim guns are being made to murder people but AirTags are not being made to stalk people. A vanishingly small fraction of total sales ever goes towards either of these undesirable use cases.
The smart move here is to get your risk models in order and stop worrying about either of these things.
- 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 for my wallet and apple remote.
I also don't see my cat wearing that thing either. Maybe a large dog.
But things like wallets, remotes, cats, dogs, are usually in your possession frequently and only lost for short periods of time before you notice.
Luggage would be a good use case, and possibly bikes and other large equipment. But I would opt for something more discreet vs a larger battery.
Plus one less card space in it, even if it did work.
> 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.
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.
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.
Go back to the page you linked -- https://support.apple.com/en-us/119874 -- the bottom of this page has a screenshot of those instructions.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Depends on the skill of the chop-shop or it's folks and where you are.
A fun thought experience would be how much suspicion a flatbed tow truck with some form of faraday cage around the car, below a cover would get from LE.
Agree with your general 'deterrent' concept, I think the main challenge a lot of folks run into is getting lazy with placement. Glove/console boxes, the 'pockets' on the back of front seats, are all stupid easy. Technically anything in the interior, probably can be 'found' with sufficient detection capability.
No, you put that thing somewhere weird and ideally a PITA to get at.
This honestly gives me the idea of finding the right spot in my WRX front headlights to make it not visible; If the spot I'm thinking of will work, they'd literally have to pull off the front bumper to even get at it...
If you put it towards the back near the center console storage, even with a phone someone's going to be checking the cup holders, the center console storage, down beside the seats, the seat back pockets, under the seats, _in the seats_, etc first. Then rechecking them. Then checking them again. Like you say, those would all be "normal" places to put it or drop it.
But you'll be able to pull it out and replace the battery or something in like 20 minutes when you had to do it once a year with nothing but a phillips screwdriver.
Alternatively, if you don't mind listening to it rattle around sometimes, from what I hear from people who have dropped rings and things into the under seat vents... you basically need to remove the entire interior to get in there. I'd get the 10 year battery first though.
For about the same price you can get a device with a SIM card and GPS/GLONASS and _zero_ ways to detect it.
And if you're stalking someone for a year, you'll have ample options to swap the device to a new one with a fresh battery.
As long as you do a good job placing/hiding it, the thief can't easily find and remove/disable without the speaker.
I've got a Pelican 1510 that has a suitcase-style pop up handle and wheels on it. It's just screwed on there. I took the screws out, took it off, filed the sides of the air tag down slightly so I could fit it in a little cranny and then held it in place with some black tape so it's hard to see. Even if you use an iPhone to try and find it, it looks like it's hidden in the liner or something. But it takes tools and about 15 minutes to get it out _even if you know exactly where it is_ and how to get to it.
For one of my backpacks it actually came with an "air tag pocket" which is just a spot on an inside seam where there's a small gap you can slide the air tag in and it's held securely. I know it's there and it still takes me a while to find the thing to take it out.
For my other, I pretty much just get by on it having a bazillion little pockets and pouches and lot of random stuff in it. The air tag's nestled in there beside the flashlight that the TSA spent almost a half hour looking for after x-raying my bag repeatedly before finally telling me what they were looking for and me pulling it out for them.
I'm relatively certain I'd recover my bag with the air tag still in it. Whether or not the _valuables_ are still there is a different story.
If I had nothing of value or only antifragile things I'd just throw everything in an old backpack. The reason I own the pelican case is for when I'm flying with $15k of computers, camera gear, etc. If anything I'd see the pelican case as _increasing_ my risk of it being stolen (who puts some clothes and some deodourant and a toothbrush in a $500 hard case?), but massively decreasing my risk of physical damage which is way more likely.
The air tag isn't even really in there for "sophisticated thieves stole my stuff" purposes so much as "airline made me gate check it and now they've lost it" purposes. Though I imagine the air tag and some basic padlocks would definitely help my chances with most unsophisticated thieves.
With a bit of creativity they can be made pretty hard to find. At least hard enough that they're no longer the weak link at all.
The next step would be trying to make it more integral to whatever thing you're trying to track. If you disassemble an air tag and hide it inside your laptop, no thief is gonna pull out some precision screwdrivers and start trying to figure out where the hell it is. They're just going to get rid of it.
... Which I've thought about, but that's a level I don't think is really necessary for my own situation.
I have an airtag in my car, but I don't think I'm going to get much value out of it other than finding my car when I forget where I'm parked.
If you want to catch a criminal in the act, you usually need to observe surreptitiously or they'll change behavior.
No, and that's mostly the point right? If they get in the car, get an alert they're being tracked, then dump the car, at least you find it faster.
From a year ago https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/newest-android-feature-aler...
1. the airtag is following you
2. the owner of the airtag does is not near the airtag
Yes.
> Are you referring to tile?
No.
(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
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.
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.
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).
But this is an accessory line. Apple is pretty good at keeping accessories working for as long as possible. AirPods v1 still work. A Magic Mouse bought 10 years ago still works as long as the battery isn't dead.
I suppose you could contradict me by providing a list of the products Apple has deprecated this way.
Can you?
If you're going to put me in a bucket, I'd be in the "Apple Hater" bucket, but I honestly think that the way that they do this is fine. It would have been better if they had jumped on the USB bandwagon earlier, they certainly love to build their own solutions that are incompatible with where the rest of the industry (see also, their proprietary wireless audio, their proprietary bluetooth codec, their proprietary thunderbolt extensions, their proprietary magsafe power connectors, their proprietary Lightning cable/connector, their forking of webkit off of khtml, their changes to webkit that are part of Safari but haven't been pushed upstream to webkit)
Anyways, this is exactly their MO and it's not bad. Apple doesn't need you to contradict everything people say about Apple.
But maybe you are talking about something else?
With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original Airpods, which came out 8 years ago and use some custom protocols alongside vanilla Bluetooth.
Maybe in the future they’ll start deprecating parts of the protocol (“in order to save your phone’s battery life” or something), but I don’t believe they have so far.
Again, it had a long run, I'm not upset that they "only" supported it for 10 years... but let's be very clear, the devices don't work. Also, this is them removing support for a protocol that is part of the base MacOS, so it's exactly like what will eventually happen when Apple stops supporting the original Airpods protocols.
I don't think that's any time soon, and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, go ham... let's just be very clear about the comparisons here.
> To replace the removed ports, the iMac has Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, which were faster and cheaper than Apple Desktop Bus and serial ports but were very new—the standard was not finalized until after the iMac's release—and unsupported by any third-party Mac peripheral.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#Design
> The last Apple device with Firewire was produced in 2012
Thunderbolt supports the Firewire protocol in the transport layer. So this means that people who need to support a Firewire device need a dongle now. Apple used to sell the adapter, apparently it's been discontinued, but they're still manufactured by third parties, and the originals available on the secondhand market. Which, given that Firewire is dead and buried, and no one is making new Firewire stuff, is also where you'd need to go to get something expecting Firewire to begin with.
I do not see this as the problem you seem to.
They were also, simultaneously, the first manufacturer to really go all-in on USB. Some PC manufacturers at the time were including one or two USB ports on their systems, but relied on legacy ports (PS/2, serial, parallel, etc) for most functionality. Their USB ports were mostly a show of "look, we have the new thing" - much in the same way that modern PC motherboards may have a single USB-C port on the back, actually.
The all-in approach required a forklift upgrade and generated a ton of e-waste.
It really wasn't that bad. I lived through it.
The iMac was pitched as an entry-level Internet computer for new computer users. Many buyers didn't have a computer at all previous to purchasing an iMac, or only had one which was old enough that its accessories would have been irrelevant (e.g. an external modem). Probably the most common USB accessory purchase was external floppy drives - and a lot of users ended up discarding those after they realized they weren't using them.
Also, I thought I was fairly clear in my comment, but Apple removed support in MacOS 13 for Firewire Audio... so it doesn't matter what kind of dongles you have, as soon as you update to 13, your firewire camera no longer works.
It's weird that Apple is removing driver-level support for a protocol. It's unexpected. It's also a dead tech that nobody cares about. The person I was responding to wanted an example of accessories that Apple stopped supporting, and "Anything with Firewire Audio" falls into that category. It is completely, utterly unusable with stock MacOS 13, though it's likely that some people have found a way to put it back in.
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.
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.
I highly doubt they do that unless they are remove airtags completely from their product line.
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.
The CNC screws mentioned in other thread appear to be part of their design language btw.
The irritating ones are in the bags/check-ins I stashed/stored snugly, and now I have to take them out to replace the battery. Of course, the bearable thing is that the battery lasts for about a month after the warning, so there is that.
I think I'm complaining about something which is not a big deal.
I’m not sure if this much bigger device is any benefit just to make it last 10-years and forget about it.
"Number of batteries" is not the right thing to measure. Maybe volume isn't either, but it's got to be closer.
Those aren't alkaline batteries. Energizer makes AA/AAA-size lithium primary batteries, which is what they are using. They wont leak and have a 25 year shelf life.
https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/l91.pdf
And I don't think they'd get complaints about alkaline batteries leaking. I think pretty much anyone (even those who don't understand batteries), would tend to blame the batteries themselves, not the device they're in.
Ironically, the very cheapest carbon-zinc batteries probably would be kind of OK in this application.
It is a registered trademark. As I understand it, common words or phrases can be protected within the same area. Colours too - https://secureyourtrademark.com/blog/t-mobile-magenta/
10 years is also long enough that perhaps the tracker might stop being supported before its battery runs out.
https://object.ceph-eu.hswaw.net/q3k-personal/5143b5491fca11...
Usually wrapped in electrician's tape.
1. NRF52 board from some scrap given by a friend, running forked/ported OpenHaystack firmware
2. AA battery holder from junk box
3. AA batteries from junk drawer
If my math is correct, this should last until AA self-discharge, ie. around 10 years. Yes, it works with Apple's FindMy network. Yes, I've flown with it.
Also there's stupid legislation in the UK at least around making smoke detectors with replaceable batteries. Took me quite a while to find some.
They won't burn because they contain metallic lithium (and not lithium salts like rechargeable cells) and don't contain easily flammable organic solvents (yep, like rechargeable cells). There are videos on YouTube of people disassembling them with no problems (for example, to extract metallic lithium for chemistry experiments).
I do wonder though: Do AA batteries actually have a shelf life of 10 years even without supplying any current?
I've got an old pinball machine. Those use AA batteries to store highscores and settings in a battery-powered RAM chip. Typically the batteries must be replaced once a year or at least every two years, largely because of self-drain, and it's a common occurrence of them leaking, which can quickly destroy the 30 year old circuit board they're on. That's why most pinball collectors suggest to use Lithium AA batteries: you get 5-10 year lifetime, no danger of leakage.
One thing I’m curious about battery leakage. Many of the batteries of my remotes and similar devices seem to leak after a while (including one I heard pop and got very warm). These are devices that do get frequent usage, so they aren’t just sitting without any discharge (but also the drain for a remote would be very minimal).
Would this device experience the same, given how little power the AirTag needs?
Lithium primary cells tend not to get all leaky with age like alkalines do. (They'll keep your remote working approximately forever, too.)
Would be kinda funny if 10 years from now the author gets his stuff stolen again and then discovers said memory leak crashed the Airtag 9 years ago. As Elon Musk likes to say: "The most ironic outcome is the most likely" . (OP I hope your stuff does not get stolen again, its just a joke)
Considering the nature of product there is no interactive interface, it doesn't perform any critical operation like motor or heater control which couldn't be easily interrupted and resumed a fraction of second later after the reboot. In case of memory leak or some kind of memory allocator error it would also be safe to reboot. User wouldn't even notice if this happened.
So even if something goes wrong, chance of it being uncrecoverable seems low. It would need to be either some kind of persistent storage bug causing it to get stuck in a bootloop (in which case battery change wouldn't help either), or high level logic error preventing normal functioning while keeping the main loop running without crash or getting stuck (writing code in higher level programming language wouldn't prevent a logic error).
There is also no guarantee they person who stole the bag wouldn't dump the bag(with the hidden AirTag) and just keep the gear or that the police would help recover it even if you gave them the location(many times the don't).
This is a basic safety drill. And it doesn't apply to expensive things only. You don't want your window broken for a sport bag with a sweaty t-shirt used in a gym like it happened to my friend. Any kind of bag left visible in a car is a risk.
I shot some pictures at a photo location, put the gear, in my camera backpack, into the trunk, drove 30 minutes to a completely different town, and stopped for lunch.
When I got back to the car, the stuff was gone. Thief had jimmied the driver's door and used the remote latch to open the trunk.
Surprisingly, my renter's insurance covered the loss without a hassle, except for a $500 deductible. But three days of pictures that I hadn't yet downloaded were gone forever :(
Photographer had their camera bag stolen from their car while waiting to get on to an on-ramp in San Fran. see https://www.ktvu.com/news/real-estate-photographer-robbed-of...
A frustrating thing is that it's completely optional to live in a society where this is a problem. We know how to stop this from happening. There are places where you just don't have to live in fear of some low-life breaking your window, and we have the technical ability to replicate those conditions in any moderately-wealthy country, if we aren't prevented from doing so.
I think there is less of a likelihood someone is going to jump you for your backpack when you are at a restaurant for lunch than there is for them breaking into a car parked only a dimly lit street for said backpack.
People who live in a high-trust society and not a shithole? I leave $10k of stuff in my car all the time, and it would be super inconvenient if I couldn't.
It doesn't even have to be a "shit hole", then what? I am out of 10k? I only have myself to blame then really because I trusted "society".
The world isn't perfect and I am not half naive enough to think it is and put my trust in it for anything worth this much.
In places where leaving $10k of gear in your car is considered foolish and the victims are blamed as many are used to these days, law enforcement is useless and the victim of the theft laughed at as being hopelessly naive.
It's the tale of two worlds really.
You are a terrible person.
Personally I'm able to risk the battery dying since the tag is on an inexpensive item I lose frequently, but I understand the annoyance of replacing the battery often.
If they wanted to be really clever, they could easily find space to disguise it as a usb hard drive or something (I mean they could literally stick a USB hard drive in the thing, they are so tiny nowadays).
Also, have you ever made an insurance claim? I have. A claim is really bad for your insurance rates with most insurance companies.
> Just discard the AirTag's back plate
I mean, first-world problem. But if it could be less frequent, of course I'd take it.
In my experience most electronic things - and especially things that are simple and solid with no wear and tear like an AirTag - easily last 10 years. I’d expect an AirTag to work for, at least, decades.
Unless there's a known failure mode in these devices that gets worn down over time you should probably expect them to outlive you. The worst you'll probably get is corrosion from the AA batteries in the pack.
The advantage of "lithium" is high rate discharge, not longevity right?
I also put lithium AA/AAA batteries in remotes these days - anything that might get stuck in a drawer for years at a time and needed again for a random task. My A/V receiver remote is rarely touched, but when I need it I really need it. Too many times have I went to grab some device like that only to find the batteries have leaked and corroded a critical component on the PCB.
I just know for your typical wall clock that takes a single AA, whether it is lithium or alkaline, both won't make it much further than a year.
Camera bag design seems to have moved on from that, and a sling design seems to be more popular.
The sling lets you swing the bag from your back under your arm to in front of you. There is a zipper towards the side that lets you securely access the camera and accessories.
So pretty easily you can get your camera out, or later put it back without removing the backpack.
My solution is I have a PD 30L as with dslr, 200-400, macro, 24-74 lens two straps are nice to have purely due to weight vs sling. The side access is clutch.
https://www.incase.com/products/dslr-pro-pack?srsltid=AfmBOo...
Lowepro also has day/overnight/carryon backpacks, so you can carry some DSLR gear, laptop, change of clothes, and toiletries, all in one bag.
I still have one LowePro day backpack that I repurposed as engineer/startup briefcase. It fits a huge laptop and misc. stuff for working late hours, and has a DSLR door in the side, so you can slide one shoulder strap off off long enough swing it forward like a sling bag, for quick access to a good camera for serendipitous shots.
Regarding real sling bags, I personally wouldn't use for lengthy carrying of heavy stuff, since it's asymmetric left/right. I even got rid of my grocery canvas tote bags, and use an old backpack for carrying home groceries.
this is a bit big and heavy.
This is another case of bad UX by a company praised for its great "product design skills".
This is precisely how an AirTag works. It reports its battery status[1] via a notification to the user on an iPhone.
Yes that's what its for
What a nonsensical fear to have.
"Put the airtag in a box" is not really an exclusive invention here.
My bet is that in 2/3 years this device will stop working already.
Just change the batteries if you AirTag once a year. Especially if you are using an AirTag to keep watch over 10.000 dollar equipment.
I have personally run these cells buried underground, and gotten 4.5 years out of 4 of them, though my application is just for fun and likely not as power conservative as an AirTag.
I made a little electronics project that is somewhere between "what happens inside a time capsule while it's buried?" and "what if you could wind a watch once and have it still be ticking in 5 years?"
I nearly forgot that I made a project page for it: https://hackaday.io/project/160740-low-power-environment-mon...
I dug up the first one last year and it had made it to 4.5 years, and I'm actually due to dig up the second one next week.
No more waking up in the middle of the night and crawling up a ladder to find out which of your smoke alarms decided it was too cold and decided to sing its low battery chirp.
There are two cases:
Your products are faulty and at least one has not made their intended 10 year lifespan. I'd change them all for better ones.
Or
They have reached their lifespan and you only noticed because the first one failed. I'd replace them all.
I would think testing them regularly - especially with simulated smoke as done in professional situations, or in my case via bad cooking, is probably more effective than regular replacement on a schedule to ensure they are always working.
If dealing with something that follows a Poisson failure probability distribution with a fixed percentage probability of failure per year (as is the case with most electrical components), regular replacement only makes the system more reliable if you are unable to test it, otherwise it makes no difference.
With a few rare exceptions, is largely a myth that replacing machines or technology at regular intervals increases reliability- people incorrectly assume this to be true, based on observing that most failures happen to things that are old, but this is merely because they spend more time being old, not because the rate of failure per time increases with age (it almost never does). Testing and redundancy are more effective and cheaper.
Now, everything I am saying would be wrong if smoke detectors indeed have components besides the alpha source whose failure rates are known to increase with age, and actually age out within a decade or so. Like you mentioned, this can be the case with electrolytic capacitors as well as non solid state relays. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the lifespan of capacitors at the low temp and low voltages in a smoke detector wasn't 50+ years.
Aha, but that's not what AirTags are for, according to Apple at least.
On https://www.apple.com/airtag Not a single mention of "theft" or "stolen".
It will even politely inform the thief you have a tracker in your stuff:
> AirTag is designed to discourage unwanted tracking. If someone else’s AirTag finds its way into your stuff, the network will notice it’s traveling with you and send your iPhone an alert
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple will come down on them with their legal team for promoting usage of the AirTag that's not according to their intended use.
I don't know, I am not Apple, and I don't even have AirTags. What do you think would happen, it seems you already have an idea?
