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A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

(www.elevationlab.com)
672 points dmd | 1 comments | 18 Dec 24 18:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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jmull ◴[19 Dec 24 19:42 UTC] No.42465013[source]▶
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.

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1. runjake ◴[19 Dec 24 22:54 UTC] No.42466585[source]▶

  > 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.