By attempting to prevent misuse they also prevent some legitimate and morally unquestionable uses. Like - the most obvious examples already mentioned in the comments - finding your cat or tracking your checked baggage. There are probably more less obvious use cases where something temporarily leaves owner's proximity, does not remain stationery, but tracking that object's location is perfectly legal and not questionable.

And this can be perceived as - arguably - restrictive and user-hostile by some.

All of those usages are permitted and ordinary uses of the device. Nothing prevents you from doing that.

As far as I can tell from reading the article, all it does is say, "Hey, did you know you've been carrying around a tracker that's not yours?" Your cat or your luggage don't care if you attach a tracker to them. Your ex does.

I'll be blunt: Neither of those use cases are very important in comparison, and neither come remotely close to justifying AirTags as unlimited tracking devices with zero restrictions.

Just go buy some other tracker for your cat or whatever.

I care a fuck-ton more about finding my dog if lost than my bag. A bag can be replaced with an identical one. A dog cannot.

Current GPS collars are absolutely trash (3 day battery life, bulky, etc), this would be about 10,000 times better if effective. But if it starts beeping randomly unprompted and scares the dog, it's a problem.

A GPS collar and this are two very very different things. An AirTag only works if an iPhone is nearby - if your dog is lost in the woods so to speak, an AirTag will not help you - a GPS collar will.

Sure but this is good enough to be useful in many situations, whereas a GPS collar is impractical enough that it's unlikely to be regularly used. I just wanna throw a chip on the 3 dogs collars and forget about it except to swap batteries once a year. I don't want to be bothered charging active GPS collars every few days and putting a heavy device for the dogs to carry.

I'm sure it's possible to get the best of both worlds, it's just that no one have made it yet. An active GPS tracker does not have to be larger than a keyfob to your car nor does it need to be online all the time. A combination where the GPS is only activated once the tag has not seen a known device for 1 hour. That should give you a battery life measured in years with meter precision when it matters.

Great idea.

I’ll be blunt: a stalker is going to find tools to do stalking without apples help. Far more people just lost out on a super easy pet tracker because of a glorified “think of the children argument”.

I don't argue, I'm trying to explain how others may see it.

Everyone has their own needs, requirements and ideas what's essential and what's not. Importance and justifications are subjective matters.

Only thing everyone can certainly agree on that those use cases were not deemed important (or even considered) by Apple, as they would've designed it differently otherwise.