A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

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.

If Apple kills existing Airtags any time soon they effectively kill the product line. So they won’t.

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The next iPhone in 6-7 years doesn't support Airtags v1 anymore as it is obsolete now for many years.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).

This is not at all in line with how Apple operates, it's diametrically opposed to it in fact.

I suppose you could contradict me by providing a list of the products Apple has deprecated this way.

Can you?

It's exactly how Apple operates. The last Apple device with Firewire was produced in 2012, though it was sold for several more years. MacOS 13 (2022) dropped the Firewire CoreAudio driver (as well as other, more niche support for Firewire). So... exactly 10 years.

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.

You’re right Apple has a playbook of changing port types every few years, but there are adaptors available. The devices themselves still work, just that Apple knows they can use this one trick to encourage some customers to upgrade.

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.