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A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

(www.elevationlab.com)
672 points dmd | 2 comments | 18 Dec 24 18:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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fsckboy ◴[19 Dec 24 23:17 UTC] No.42466744[source]▶
>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.

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1. bhaney ◴[19 Dec 24 23:22 UTC] No.42466780[source]▶
> so that it will more likely to be charged and location tracking at the time it is stolen

Unless you're ignoring/suppressing the low battery notifications for months, that's already overwhelmingly likely.

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2. fsckboy ◴[19 Dec 24 23:42 UTC] No.42466933[source]▶
i don't like changing the batteries in my smoke detectors. it's too frequent. they remind me, it doesn't go unnoticed, it's not that they are inadvertently running out, i don't like doing it, every time is too frequently

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.