I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.

Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.

However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.

So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.

Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.

But also the thief and his accomplice.

The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.

Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.

When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.

You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.

So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.

They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.

It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.

Still, in those very early days of "Find my" I could see how this was going to eventually change things.

They get shot.

Quite the contrary. Events such as these reveal who really believe in a sovereign, free, people and who is just cosplaying.

For example, Pritti and Rittenhouse were completely within their rights to be armed at a protest.

Rittenhouse defended himself against a mob that started attacking him unprovoked; Pritti was executed by federal agents.

And gee... he's notably absent from Minneapolis. Why is he not "defending" people from tyranny now? Because he's a coward who only goes on field trips to shoot unarmed people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771650.

Latin-based-language countries also have more relations to the english world (mostly through Britain historically conquering most of them), and so as an English speaker you're more likely to see news about those countries.

I'm not sure if you're trying to imply something else, but if you are, please don't. The relationships between languages, what countries are reported in the western news, what countries americans (i.e. the HN audience visit), and so on is complicated, multi-faceted, and cannot be easily boiled down to language as a root cause of anything.

Police: "Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."

Me: "Isn't selling known stolen property a crime in itself?"

Police: ...

Me: ...

Police: "We're not going to pursue this further."

Thank you for your service?

Now the cops and judge have an incentive to actually prosecute, since it generates their funding.

Now it only costs them money.

As in - he could afford to pay if his job was kept, etc. But charge him with the felony, he would likely lose that job and the ability to repay anything in any meaningful manner.

Then you have the State of Florida, who charges you $75/day if you are in jail at all, regardless of the outcome of your case, charges being dropped or dismissed. You could be arrested for a BS traffic stop on Friday, the prosecutor drops it on Monday morning, three days incarceration. Or a not guilty finding. Doesn't matter.

And then, failure to pay this is a Class B Felony.

That’s just ‘oh, my poor back’.

One time I was driving down a twoo-lane road with a police car a few hundred feet behind me. An oncoming pickup truck veered several feet over the center line and almost hit me. I flagged the police down to tell them and they were nonplussed even though they literally saw it happen. Drunk driving, a greater threat than property theft, was of little consequence to them.

On the other side of the country my motorcycle got stolen and the police found it the next day. I picked it up from the tow yard shortly thereafter.

YMMV.

I have fixed that for you.

If you look at the map of Europe, lay it over with that fiscal discipline and above, there is no mystery how things like income are spread out across the map, it all makes sense. Also a good confirmation that well regulated but proper capitalism is the easiest path for any country to long term prosperity.

I mean, isn't that good? 4th amendment, warrants from a judge, and all that.

Generally, a city is called a sanctuary city if they don't honor hold orders on detainees from customs and immigration, it has nothing to do with police not enforcing immigration rules, which they can't do either way.

Oakland PD has their own bad reputation to live down to, let’s not commingle them.

It sucks but once you know it, it would be like thinking you can just leave your wallet sitting on a counter.

High-functioning society lol.

In America, you can proudly say you grope and molest women and it's considered presidential behavior.

How many days is it since the last state sanctioned shooting?

From what I heard from others, apparently the thieves have a device that allows them to detect electronics (I had two laptops, cellphone, and a few other devices). I'm not sure how accurate this is, but i'm not sure why my car was the only one on the street that was targeted as there were no visible signs of valuables in the car (nothing visible from windows etc.) Funny part is a few weeks later nothing was found except for my Kindle which a kind citizen found and returned to me. Apparently thieves don't like to read?

It’s a coastal elite view.

As for whether they’re people and not wildlife as you put it, I suspect I’m more right than you are. Some of them have almost been acquitted because after killing people while robbing them it was offered as an explanation that they are too stupid to know that killing was bad.

https://sfist.com/2024/09/20/sf-jury-convicts-two-for-2017-m...

> Decuir and Mims were convicted last year of armed robbery, but a jury deadlocked on the first-degree murder charge, leading to this second trial… Attorneys also argued that she had a low IQ…

How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?

I read that article and I can (somehow) appreciate an ideal of prison reform so strong that it precluded reporting a crime--I think anyway--however, I did not see an explanation of what sort of remedy or justice this practitioner of a belief "in the abolition of police and prisons" would prefer. What is the appropriate punishment for such a crime? This is missing in the perspective presented. There is a description of a want for the perpetrator to change but no mechanism described for forcing the person to begin to change, just a reconciliation that every situation is different enough to avoid prescribing a template solution.

In the theft context, tolerating people that steal seems to enable theft. Humans can reason and are a product of the choices they've made. One ideal of the courts is exposure to alternatives, in the case of your deadlocked murder case, there are annoying factors from my arm chair: perhaps first-degree was too high a bar, the use of IQ in a legal setting in 2023 is annoying because without knowing how it was measured it should be assumed culturally biased and pointless, what levels of decision making abrogate personal responsibility--in managing a disease or making choices that lead to finding oneself in a particular setting. The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.

Theft is considered acceptable in coastal elite culture so long as it is from a multi-store chain. I haven't yet figured out how many stores transforms a chain from independent (theft-unacceptable) to corporate (theft-permitted, perhaps even encouraged). It is somewhat underspecified but at a sufficiently franchised operation, it is considered moral to steal.

> The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.

In this case, the person most affected did not make a statement as to his intended outcome. This is probably because he was killed in the commission of his crime, but we have no peer-reviewed studies that have proven that so we must consider it speculation.

You mean like Coast Miwok or Pomo?

Completely false, you mean Urban areas are not high trust.

I live in a place (In the US) where kids walk to school, don't lock bikes and our downtown has free umbrellas to take and give back whenever there is rain.

In many parts of the world, including major cities, it would be okay to leave your belongings in a locked car.

It's crazy to me other people just live with this. Dramatic action is needed and possible.

I don't own the key to my house, it's not something we think about here (US, south).

I can’t tell if you think people obviously do leave guns in their car, and GP should know better than add the phrase in, or, that nobody does, and GP should know better.

I can tell you have seen people do both in different parts of the country.

https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-thefts-from-cars-th...

It is not smart to die or have your things subtracted just because you want to make a point of how things should be, a point that nobody will care about.

For example, something can be your responsibility but not your fault, or vice-versa. Responsibility is literally just the duty to respond.

It's not your fault. It's California's fault for tolerating a culture of criminality.

it wasn't your mistake calling them, but be thankful you escaped: those police were apparently vampires.

My solution now is to travel very light.

Sadly even once he got the subpoena and other paperwork to track down the criminals through Facebook (they had listed my wheels two weeks later on Marketplace) he couldn't find them since they were using VPNs.

The stereotype of US cops not caring isn't always true.

Unfortunate fact for the perp was the ill husband was a US Attorney and stealing his phone made it a big boy federal felony that was not looked kindly upon by the colleagues of a dying AUSA in the Northern District. I wonder if he's still in FCI Lompoc.

So smart.

> So smart

What should have been done instead?

Its sort of a combination of two reasons.

First in many cities, police departments are underfunded. And so running around looking for your stolen phone or whatever minor item is low on their to-do list compared to say, stopping the local drug-gangs from shooting their brains out.

Second, for minor thefts most insurance companies just need a quick box-tick "police crime report number" before paying out. So if the police know they can get you off their backs just by quickly giving you a report number, well....

I'm guessing people have that impression from TV, but it doesn't seem to match reality.

> the data suggests that officers spend relatively little time responding to major violent crimes: 4%, 3.7% and 4.1% in the three locations, respectively.

- https://www.freethink.com/society/how-police-spend-their-tim...

According to a police administrator I once knew, filling out all the endless paperwork that makes the studies possible so people can complain about what little time cops spend fighting crime.

Thats a good thing tho, its the problem(s) solving themselves.

Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.

Since the islands he now lives on has no BMW presence they want him to ship the car back to get new keys.

So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.

Try as I might, I could not get the Metropolitain Police interested. From Royal Mail tracking numbers, I was able to figure out which post office the docs were being sent from. I took a pile of those fake docs to a large police station literally across the street from the post office. Got a crime reference number and was told to keep the docs. :)

In Zürich, I once came off my bicycle. No one else involved, no damage to anything except myself. The police were on the scene six minutes later (they responded when a helpful passer-by called for an ambulance). Offered to take my bicycle for safekeeping while I was in hospital, which was jolly nice of them. :)

People of all ethnicities all over the world steal. Plenty of immigrants work extremely hard and don't steal.

I truly can't believe my statement was 'controversial' and down vote worthy. I mean who cares about the HN points...but really??

In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.

Also say that you're thinking of intervening personally.

That usually gets them going.

In a similar vain I was the first on the scene of a car crash in the UK, where the driver had exited the vehicle through the window (no seat belt) and was bleeding in the road. When the police turned up they casually and slowly walked up the road towards the scene.

It made me wonder if there was a good reason for this, like to control adrenaline, make better decisions, have time to assess the situation. Or if they were just jaded from seeing it a lot.

That said, the policy can be, and certainly is, applied in imbalanced ways when justice is pursued over pragmatism.

Other kinds of property crime? The costs of enforcement are high compared to the losses caused by individual cases, prioritization is understandably a difficult problem to solve.

The pervasive problems you see in places like SF or much of the UK are just far more boring.

No, it isn't. The police in the UK are stretched extremely thin.

yes, some of my stupid colleagues will once in a blue moon arrest people for twitter nonsense, but that barely ever happens which is why it makes the news and they pretty much never get convicted.

Not much real police work happening any more unless you criticize the government or do something they can use as a reason to grow their budgets or otherwise further political agendas.

If there is a video of a crime they do like that...easy! Also they can show it to media for props.

Lazy cops just love centralized 'social' media and the fools who post their lives on it for them to snoop through.

>look inside

>12000 arrests a year

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...

The government is currently seeking to amend that:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/crime-and-policin...

> The bill will remove the perceived immunity granted to shop theft of goods to the value of £200 or less, by repealing Section 22A of the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980 and the legislation that inserted it (section 176 of Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014).

> This will ensure that all offences are tried as ‘general theft’ (an either way offence with a maximum custodial sentence of seven years), instead of summarily in the magistrates’ court, unless the defendant elects for jury trial

"Either-way" here means that the offence can be tried either as a summary or indictable offence; an indictable offence can carry much more serious penalties.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/12/section/176

> 22A (1) Low-value shoplifting is triable only summarily.

Still, the public would appreciate some effort - if anything to actually get some of their stuff back, if not to inconvenience thieves.

Here's an article I searched up about it: https://adfinternational.org/news/uk-christian-woman-crimina...

Most would agree that 150 people standing in front of the abortion clinic would obviously an attempt to impede or influence people. What if someone stands there "praying" but really noting faces and license plates for future harassment? Where does the law draw that line?

The ADF is a discriminatory, corrosive organization that has done real harm to millions by rolling back civil rights in the US, and now they have taken their agenda internationally.

The hypocrisy of calling this a "thought crime" is stunning. ADF is the same organization that brought a case against a Colorado law that banned discrimination against LGBTQ businesses, because a baker was worried she may have to bake a cake for a gay wedding - which she was never asked to do. So some thoughts are legally protected (prayer) while others (concern) are justifications to roll back civil rights. But the thoughts of others (terror and shame while entering an abortion clinic, feelings when discriminated against, love for a same sex partner) are irrelevant and not worthy of protection.

Their stated purpose is "advancing every person’s God-given right to live and speak the truth" - but only "live" and speak the "truth" that they deem to be correct, based on their evangelical and politically-charged interpretation of Christianity. And they want that legislated.

How is that important?

I believe in free access. I also believe those going to get an abortion shouldn’t be impeded by protesters in the immediate vicinity when getting their healthcare.

No, the woman was there tying to influence other women’s healthcare, something she had no right to get involved in.

Edit: The police did screw this up - the clinic was closed. She also received a payout.

Framing this as ‘thought police’ is wrong, the issue was her presence.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gze361j7xo

There were no other people visible, she made no noise.

She didn't impede anyone, and it would have been very difficult to tell she was protesting, if that's in fact what she was doing (I'm not her, so I don't know).

I don't believe in God, so those particulars (or that it was an abortion clinic) aren't important to me. She was arrested for thinking silently to herself.

I take it you live somewhere roughly in the middle of nowhere?

Even New York City has a county sheriff.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/finance/sheriff-courts/sheriff.page

Go rage-post on Reddit. HN is supposed to be better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements

Some pissed off riff-raff family member decides that you look like the killer.

You’d better have a top notch lawyer in your family or prepare to spend lots of money hiring one.

Which, in your hypothetical "you might get extremely unlucky" scenario, should give you no problem, since you never had a firearm on you in the first place.

https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/14523420-polemique-autour-dun...

And when you take the train, have a baby, and land on this fucked up article https://www.20min.ch/fr/story/sodomie-infantile-un-film-choc... you know the country is fucked up.

https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/vaud/2025/article/comedien-v... 4years for a teacher raping his teens students.

Should I start talking about the different train stations and all the drug dealers or drug users ?

I have recollection of french police using civilian appearance to collect a bike thief in a meetup between him and the bike's original owner presenting himself as a buyer.

The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.

So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)

I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.

Wrote my PhD dissertation on this. It would've been in the literature for Apple's engineers to find, but unfortunately I lost institutional support to get this into a journal after my college (Mailorderdegrees.com, an FTX University^TM) folded mid-process.

My current carry-on doesn't have large enough attachment points to easily accommodate the Apple leather case's keyring, so an updated loop would have been welcome.

For some reason, people feel like this should be a replacement for traditional luggage tags.

I do not understand this mindset.

I’d prefer to have a dedicated loop for my bag and the inside attachment points just aren’t big enough. I’d feel more secure if it wasn’t loose in a pocket and could easily fall out or be removed by an unscrupulous (or inattentive) airline or TSA employee.

  > I think this argument would work better if the AirTag in its minimal form wasn't so teardrop-shaped.

Which is an appreciated and surprisingly un-Apple move. Despite some physical limitations this imposes, I applaud it.

I'm a little confused by this, aren't AirTag basically circular discs pretty much just big enough to house a CRT2032 battery?

Form factor wise they don't look teardrop shaped at all in the pictures?

I don't have one so could just be missing something obvious here.

Kind of. It's definitely the intention, but an AirTag is still considerably larger than the CR2032 within it [1], so they're not at a shortage of space in the shell.

As for "teardrop shape", I didn't mean to imply it had an elongated shape, but that it's rounded off on all sides, like a drop of liquid. The absence of any defined edges makes clip design harder and forces any AirTag enclosure to just act as a mini-pocket that contains the whole thing instead of having a simpler and less wasteful attachment method.

[1] https://www.macworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/airtag-b...

https://www.belkin.com/p/secure-holder-with-key-ring-for-air...

For some reason, though, it is cheaper in the Indian Amazon. Right now, they are selling for roughly $9.70 (₹889) a piece (all taxes inclusive).

To be fair, most people I know put their AirTag inside something, e.g. inner pocket of a bag.

At which point the necessity for an attachment point becomes somewhat moot.

Oh, wait...

I disagree, they could have, they didn’t want to. Beyond the look, this sure panders to their accessory partners.

How big of an industry is the phone case? Should it even exist? The audacity.

By the time you stripped a dumbphone down to be as vulnerable as one of today's is, it'd be a bare PCB. Nah, probably even in that state, I bet it could handle a drop better than a new iPhone straight out of the box.

What you buy today isn't a complete phone, it's just the guts. One tumble to pavement and you're out a grand. Heaven help you if you fumble it while trying to install the case that should've been part of it from the beginning.

And yet, we still buy them, because the alternatives are from shady manufacturers who never provide updates, and there is no third-party hardware that can run up-to-date iOS. If there was, I'd buy an iNokia in a heartbeat.

That 1 meter fall resulted in calls unable to be placed, USB charging and ABD does not work, and the microphone for the voice recorder does not work. All that indicates that the daughterboard cable was displaced. But the unworking rear camera indicates that there is a second fault in there as well.

Not to mention the alarmingly large dent in the corner, that shattered the screen protector and likely would have resulted in the screen itself having shattered if no protector were on it.

New phones are designed to break. Contrast with my Note 3 that I carried for 8 years without so much as cracking the screen once.

Almost every single one "case" for iPhone is a waste. Waste of material, waste of space, waste of your money, waste of user experience. You've already paid for a perfectly good phone, and then slapped some $[1]0.99 case on it to gain nothing but pain and vanity.

I only had one case on a phone, that made it better - original wooden case for 1+3T. Been looking for same experience on iPhone, but it's not possible due to shape -- they are all bulky. The closest thing is carbon-fiber cases, and I had one, which saved this iPhone when I dropped it onto slanted pavement, where it slid for a few meters screen down, ruining the case, but saving the screen.

Would I drop it if I wasn't using a case, that has parts sticking out, making the phone more cumbersome to use and carry? Unlikely, because it happened in the first year owning it, and I've been going caseless since then and nothing similar happened.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/02/x-rays-show-how-a...

Does the author lack thumbs? It’s easy to twist the battery open.

Apple could trivially have fit a usable hole if they wanted to. They just don't want to because they get to sell accessories with that now. Also, looking cleaner on its own helps sell even if that is an entirely useless quality for a tag tha tneeds to go into a bloody case.

I don't know of any third-party AirTag-compatible trackers that have UWB right now, but this applies equally to tags that are much larger than the AirTag. The rest is identical - good battery life, range, loud speaker, ...

I have a few theories on the lacking UWB:

1. Given that UWB is also super slow to roll out to Google Find, with only the Moto Tag available, there might be a technical/regulatory hurdle that manufacturers don't think is worth it

2. Apple/Google might make it a pain to be allowed to integrate with their UWB stuff

3. Cost - maybe the UWB stack is comparatively expensive, with third-party tags aiming for price brackets as low as 1/0th the cost of an AirTag

As a note, I don't know if this is because of regional differences in spectrum limits, but at least with AirTag and Moto Tag v1 EU versions, I could never get UWB to give any meaningful directions until I was already staring at the thing. Once you were in range to even consider UWB, playing a sound would be way more effective.

First-gen AirTags have been on sale on Amazon frequently over the last year, and they’ll probably drop the price again soon.

I keep seeing products in the supermarket with big "Made with REAL ingredients!" labels on them.

As opposed to what? Imaginary ingredients?

Classico pasta sauce is the most recent offender.

Like orange juice: can be from a chemical powder or real oranges.

Highlighting this has been a priority in my parenting. My child is having a great time trying to scare friends about the dangers of the chemical dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in a surprisingly large number of manufactured foods.

As for natural versus artificial - that's also bullshit. There's many natural ingredients that are poison, and many artificial ones that are good for you.

I mean, if I eat home made fried chicken everyday, you can bet your ass I'm not gonna live very long.

Orange juice is also bad for your health BTW!

not trying to pick on you specifically, because sure everything's a chemical, and i don't really care to fight about that, but you asked :)

Like, banana-flavoured milk product vs banana yogurt - seed oil and potato starch compound with artificial flavorings vs REAL milk yoghurt with REAL banana.

It tastes different, it has different nutritional value and overall "chemical" product feels scammy because it tries to mimic proper one.

This is all about words, like, why do we use "Artificial" in Artificial Intelligence?

Chemical is just a bad word choice. Artificial, or ultra processed get closer to the issue. They still are vague with a lot of grey area. If you cook at home, you're also highly processing your food. The fruit in winter is likely also artificial, in some sense: Grown against the will of god/nature with pesticides, in a tent, in a climate that doesn't naturally feature them, devoid of flavour because they were artificially bred for yield, color and size, etc.

This is arbitrary subjective qualifier, goes somewhere between "isoamyl acetate" flavoring chemical and organic wild forest bananas. I would subjectively say that any grown bananas is REAL while isoamyl acetate made by rectification of amyl acetate is not REAL banana.

Maybe people are simply reacting to chemical-sounding words.

With the nature fallacy, the definition (or more like the lack of) of what is natural is the entire crux of it. In both cases (natural and "non-chemical") it's the very non-defined-ness that reveals the problem with it: You cannot create a sensible definition.

For nature, what's the definition that puts "rape" and "artificial insulin" on the morally correct side?

For chemical, what's the definition that puts "fortification with iodine, flouride, or whatevers in flour" and "arsenic" on the right side?

My understanding is that when someone complains about "chemicals" in their food, it's because they've seen something they don't understand on the ingredient list and are scared of it.

For some of them, like cherry or coconuts, the artificial flavor tastes nothing like the natural flavor.

As for coconut there's Lactones, which - you guessed it - occur naturally.

> OK for vanilla, however most of the fruit artificial flavors are compound that have nothing to do with the elements from the natural fruit but at some point, someone in the food industry decided it tasted "similar" to the natural fruit.

Care to provide a source?

It’s a genuine question, since I don’t like Apple and agree that we buy tons of stuff we don’t really need. That said, our bicycles can’t be insured anymore, but having AirTags at least alleviates some of the angst over leaving them in public places.

Dumb example for the sake of discussion, you could understand why recycled plutonium would not be a healthy thing to weave a sweater out of. It's less about the recycling and more about the material itself.

But: the AirTag is made of hard plastic (polypropylene?) through injection moulding. I’m not sure it leaks even a tenth of what fiber would. Just a thought :)

That's pretty energy intensive, to the point that it may be better to just use new feedstock (which is produced as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction). There are obviously higher-order effects to think about, but for me, plastic recycling isn't an obvious win for the environment.

I think we’ve more or less debunked plastic recycling, as nothing more but a way to make consumers feel good about purchasing things made of plastic.

We have to recycle plastic where we live — and do so happily —, but I often joke with my partner about where the plastic will end up, since she insists on first washing the plastic.

Moral of the story: plastic is just not good. Avoid buying things made out of ANY kind plastic if you are going to regularly wash and mechanically agitate them. You won't eliminate 100% of washed plastic in your life, but it's surprisingly easy to get rid of 80% of it without sacrificing quality of life.

Mass balance is better than nothing I guess, & I understand the practical challenges with going further, but ultimately it's not what's implied by the marketing.

[0] https://www.iscc-system.org/news/mass-balance-explained/

I never thought I needed one until my wife lost her car keys, and the Fiat dealer charged $1,200 for a replacement.

And it's not even the electronics that makes them so expensive. Modern car keys aren't like the 1970's where it's just a piece of metal with the edges shaved off. Those little key cutting kiosks at Home Depot can't cope with today's complex engraving.

Found the guy who literally never leaves his studio apartment and has thus never lost baggage, keys, etc.

They do require periodic battery replacements but I imagine it’s still a net savings or pretty negligible cost. I’d love to see a more formal analysis, though.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/apple-expands-global-...

Do they disclose who the manufacturers are and what standards do they adhere to when recovering cobalt from scrapped batteries?

You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.

They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.

(or the card 5 for wallets)

the card-shaped one i've got in my wallet isn't going to be replaced by an official airtag any time soon though, that form factor is too nice.

Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.

but i think there's some available now in the card form factor that have rechargeable batteries, and that's what i'll buy when i have to replace this one.

Also, my understanding is that AirTags are only usable if you have an iPhone, am I wrong?

I have a pair of Soundcore buds, and they work well. Unless only one of the two decides to not connect to the phone. Or they randomly decide to change the noise cancellation setting. Or their gesture detection randomly triggers. To be fair, it's pretty rare and easy to fix: put them back in the case and back out, etc. But it's small things that remind me "yeah, I did not shell out for AirPods". (also, their transparency mode for conversations is nigh useless, but it may be because those are a 4 year old model).

I regularily use a pair of Sony headphones too, and they are a bit less troublesome, because it's a much simpler product: a single BT connection, physical buttons for some quick controls, etc. But they still have their warts: can't charge and be used at the same time, handoff between two source devices still don't work after years, etc.

It's an accumulation of details that are not big, happen rarely, and don't need much to get used to. But they still need to get used to.

Any time any of the registered devices needs to emit sound, the AirPods instantly switch to this device (and both devices will show an unobtrusive notification to reverse the auto switch).

And it works every. single. time.

Apple can't make Airdrop work reliably after decades but somehow, they are able to magically and instantly transfer bluetooth audio from a device to another device.

Though, if you use your airpods with anything non apple, it will juste work like a classical bluetooth device, with manual pairing and no magic switching.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bensin/2025/12/11/huaweis-freec...

When it works, they at least connect with little friction. That's nice. The real value is in the very good noise-cancellation and battery life.

I would not call that usable.

Cramming lots of tech into a small footprint is an extremely complex affair.

But that hasn't been true for a decade. Most improvements have been marginal, and they totally missed the boat on LLMs.

I call out Google as an exception because Gemini when it works correctly from an integration point of view can actually do some cool stuff like predictive suggestions in messaging based on context, though I wish it was all on device stuff, as on a privacy level I don’t trust Google

That said, it’s not like they’re so far and above anyone else they blow the competition out of the water either, they simply managed to make the functionality sometimes useful

There was no world where they were going to be the breakthrough leader in LLM development. That's a problem they can catch up on when they need to or license the technology.

Their hardware has been exceptional in recent years.

Little did I know, GPS jammers around the city make my grandma appear 50km away.

Not Apple's fault of course.

That does come with the risk of Tim Cook falling out of a window.

Does the Sensor Apple uses not use GLONASS in Russia? Or is it cheapo Android Phones picking up the tag and then sending GPS coords into cloud?

edit: Nvm, I might be dumb, I guess unless your jamming includes all commodity GNSS it's pretty useless.

AirTags have no integration with Android devices. There's a shitty app from Apple you can install that allows you to scan for AirTags nearby, one shot. It's supposedly against stalkers, but it's practically useless. There a bunch of other community apps with varying features like finding and notifying you there's an AirTag nearby. But you can't even track your own AirTags from an Android device, because Apple have decided you must do it from an iDevice. No browser, no Android app. You can check your iPhone's location via the browser, but not the AirTag.

The Android ecosystem has an alternative thing, but depending on the phone manufacturer you have to opt in to your device being used to track trackers around you.

When I travel to places with low iPhone market share, I always have one tracker of each ecosystem, just in case.

GPS was primarily developed as a military technology. It was intentionally inaccurate for all civilians up until the year 2000.

While they’re all susceptible to jamming, one system getting shutdown by its operator means most modern devices can shift to the others for most applications. Not unusual for consumer devices to support multiple (but dunno how they handle disagreements)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation_device

https://www.xda-developers.com/apple-iphone-14-gps-support/#...

I think there are other options too

Notably they now support both the Apple and Android ecosystems from a single hardware SKU, although only one at a time, and the formerly disposable battery can now be recharged with a standard Qi wireless charger.

Having recently switched to Android I was tempted to give Chipolo products a try, but this reddit thread disuaded me, as multiple users there are reporting the exact kinds of issues that I experienced previously: https://www.reddit.com/r/Chipolo/comments/1n4m4j3/chipolo_po...

Any recommendations for a rechargable but thin one, AirTag itself is too thick for regular wallets.

I've been using one of these with Find My for over a year. I've not done anything with the Eufy app, just the Find My app itself. It lacks the precision find, but you can play a sound through the Find My app / get directions / share the item / flag the item as lost / do left behind and it works well.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZ8C5N7H

Have one in my wallet. Will probably get some more AirTags.

I think there are also several third-party wallet trackers that integrate with the Find My network.

I own 8 AirTags, and have them on all my sets of keys and in all my bags. I've managed to avoid loss about 5 times in the 3 years of using them. It also gives me piece of mind when landing on a plane that my luggage is where its meant to be.

If you want to stop your wallet being stolen, I'm afraid your options are very limited.

As for theft - you might be overthinking it. It's a black piece of plastic that could easily be a door key. Gutter thieves will rifle the wallet and pull out cash, and credit cards, and drop the rest in the trash anyway. Any regular thief knows they don't want to be caught holding someone else's id.

But man that's one of my best use cases, toss a tag in my kid's pocket when we are somewhere busy. I used one on my older in-law who tended to wander.

They work great for that.

Interesting to call out that it’s not designed for pets. I know several people with AirTags on their pet collars.

Apple doesn't, maybe, want to explain why these are for tracking the living?

2. they contain small parts that pets might inadvertently eat, and some of the collars that exist for them have been known to snag on things and entrap pets.

They're not great for tracking things that move on their own, or things that avoid people.

They make breakaway collars so if they get caught on something it won't trap them.

Even an airtag moving a little bit, will give you warnings in find my.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/01/apple-introduc...

Skeuomorphism is more about making the UI work like the real world, not just look like it.

ps, Apple is driving me nuts with their branding. With is AirPods one word and Find My two words?

For example, I let my mother in law use luggage of mine with an airtag still in it and every time she moved it after the first day or so, it would play a noise.

The first time I replaced my AirTag batteries I had to remove some of the coating or it wouldn’t power the AirTag.

Now, do I try to test this by licking the battery or should I try to sand the surface without pre-testing? :)

Basically it thought it was being used for stalking (close to an unknown device) and started beeping. Turning off the android phone stopped that.

> For the first time, users can use Precision Finding on Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, to find their AirTag, bringing a powerful experience to the wrist.

"watchOS 26.2.1 is also coming, and it expands Precision Finding to the Apple Watch Series 9 and later, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. We have not yet confirmed if this is for the new AirTag only or also works with the original model."

- Throw one in your checked bag when traveling

- Mount one in a relatively concealed location on your bike

- Keychain (depending on if you're prone to misplacing your keys)

Personally I don’t always have an Apple device in my backpack, and when traveling you can’t put devices in checked luggage, so I use them for those use cases at least.

AirTags are terrible for surreptitious tracking, alerting every iOS user nearby of a tracked product following them around.

I mean, years ago people, such as stalkers, would use it for this purpose, but Apple rightly gimped that. There are a lot of specialized, self-connected trackers that creeps and criminals use.

This is consistent with my understanding that it only goes off if it travels with you for a very long time, or to your house. (Of course, at that point it's too late because they know where you live already.)

I'm not sure what I'm to make of your absence of your alerts. Perhaps that happens because you have no such trackers moving with you? Like, are you saying you do and there are false negatives?

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/119874

But if someone steals it, they get an alert that there's an airtag traveling with them, and they can go through their loot to figure out which item it is, and ditch it, or destroy it. In the first case I get my labelmaker back, but I never bust the thief.

They knew what they were doing and I'm sure the stalking aspect helped their sales significantly as it seems to be a very popular behaviour in the US.

while not denying people have done this, I do have problems thinking that it was a significant portion of the sales numbers. exaggerating problems is not necessary and actually reduces the credibility of the people doing the exaggerating

Virtually any tracking or surveillance has a knock-on effect that we often overlook in our enthusiasm, but Apple absolutely should have foreseen the abuse that would happen, and certainly profited off of it.

Curious about getting 2x the distance from 1.5x the "loudness", I would have thought the inverse? Maybe there is nuance to this though.

When actually traveling with your stuff there's a personal comfort question of how comfortable you feel in setting things like hotel rooms as "trusted" so you don't get a lot of pings when you leave things behind intentionally in places like hotel rooms. I think that's my biggest ask for AirTags is an easier way to set explicitly time-bound trusts: trust this exact hotel room until my checkout date; trust this exact office space until the end of this work day.

I don’t have any explanation for how our experiences could be so different, but they are. Mine even did the cool thing where you can watch your luggage move through an airport until you join up with it.

You'll have the same problem if you do something like: set the AirTag up on an iPad, but then carry around with an Android phone on you or just any phone not logged into your Apple Account. The beeping is the anti-stalking feature since it thinks it's separated from its owner.

I had to put in a few of my daughter’s pencil pouches and some toys; they are cheaper than the AirTags and, financially, make no sense to lose an AirTag that costs more than the items being tracked. But hey, daughter is happy, and that covers up for the cost.

It's been, what, six years now? The media would pay hand over fist for an airtags stalking story and how many have there actually been?

I mean it was enough of a concern that Android added a "detect airtags" feature to the base android OS.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/woman-allegedly-tracks-boyfriend-w...

Oh come the fuck ON. I'm not installing your silly fuzzy UI, Apple. Get over it.

I use these to help keep track of my kids, but I'll probably get them AWs before I upgrade to 26 in all honesty.

That's great, but could they do something about what plays on the speaker? It's all pretty in that Apple sort of way, but the fact that its volume goes up and down makes it harder to find. Y'know, exactly the one thing you're trying to do with it?

If only it were usable with an Android phone :(

https://www.amazon.com/Tracker-Locator-Android-Bluetooth-Fin...

I've had a set of airtags for a good few years now (shortly before Covid, I think?) and they mostly just kinda work. They don't insist upon a need to upgrade, the only part that ever goes bad is the battery -- which is a standard, user-replaceable CR2032, and while batteries going into the garbage isn't fantastic, there's really only so much you can do as long as depend on them.

Like -- this announcement is technically an upgrade, but I've never been less tempted to actually buy into it because the existing product does what it does plenty well enough for my needs.

I do think it's a bit funny to highlight anything Google does now as privacy-first, though. I can't play back Youtube embeds in Waterfox because the browser's default privacy-preserving setting doesn't send referrer information to those embeds, which Youtube now requires for embeds to work. As much as I take issue with Apple's politics over the past year, they do tend to lean towards on-device logic where possible, and their work in the homomorphic cryptography niche has been interesting to follow.

It's like when I learned that many paper recycling programs end up combining paper with regular garbage, or finding out that plastic recycling is comically ineffective in its outcomes.

Attaching these things to anything is their major flaw.

/picard facepalm

So ... not much of a dastardly plan from Apple?

Has that ever been demonstrated for a single object, even if allowing the object to be a thousand times as large as this?

I've seen these myself for my partner's AirTag when I was carrying her stuff.

Apparently Android 6+ can warn you about AirTags in the same way, since May 2024: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-and-google-deli...

I know because I have an android phone and a not-so-used ipad and mine beep all the time.

What stalking scenario are you worried with?

Apple has already done more than enough to discourage stalking. We shouldn’t nerf all our technology to the ground because assholes exist.

For example, meet someone at a convention/fair/job, gift/sell them something which has a hidden tag, and then wait for them to drive to their hotel, or home. Gotcha. With influencer and celebs, you can also send something to their agency, and hope they are re-routed to their home. S** like that happened quite often until people learned to be more careful. Probably still sometimes happens even now.

Or the much more, frankly common, scenario is: a $15 plushie bought through Amazon wishlist, sold by PerpOwned LLC for $500, and delivered through Amazon warehouse. That's actually happening.

A phone's stalking detection just looks for a tag that's not yours that has been around you for a while.

But you can modify a tag such that it selectively powers up, or build a tag that changes identifiers, such that the stalking detection tools don't pick it up.

I've written a bit about this here: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/further-thoughts-on-stealth-ai... https://www.hotelexistence.ca/exploring-bluetooth-trackers-a...

I'm glad this appears to have been a focal point of the design.

I recently picked up a few of these extended battery packs and it would be nice to eventually upgrade the AirTag if the extended range turns out to be meaningful. They're pretty neat, you remove the battery cover completely and only insert the half of the AirTag with the electronics and radio.

https://www.elevationlab.com/products/timecapsule

These non-rechargeable ones have pretty good reviews though, and apparently last much longer than normal AAs (both in terms of capacity and storage). I'll probably start putting them in the handful of things I've got that still take AAs.

https://nomadgoods.com/in/products/tracking-card

Love the fact that it's rechargeable - although a little bit annoying that it's with a USB to proprietary connector.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-Ultra-Slim-Rechargeable-Comp...

Don't they want people's money or what's the business case here?

They DID ship here a long time ago, I owned their aluminium docks and a few other things.

If one is in close proximity to the device (say bluetooth), one can take it out of this mode and return it to normal usage.

That's actually what I would love to see cops doing! Petty theft is among the most annoying nuisances there is, particularly for tourists. And I'd classify petty thefts in tourist areas, public transport and similar hotspots as aggravated cases as well.

Honestly, it doesn't take that much work. Have the mayor announce that police will now take stolen-property claims seriously and immediately follow up on reports, maybe run the occasional sting operation themselves... and the thieves will go away somewhere else all on their own.

Yes, you might run the risk of only catching some piss poor drug addicts instead of the brokers accepting and selling on the stolen merchandise - but when the brokers can't find anyone willing to risk a mandatory year in prison for petty theft, they will have to close up shop as well.

I don't think you can speak to the relative likelihood of these with any confidence. There are lots of people for whom stalking is a much bigger problem than theft.

You sure you still wanna pull that switch?

And I know, I know, the downvoterinos!

I don't actually care about this issue at all. The observation is: that moral grandstanding of "woman's lives to stolen bicycles" is somewhat amusing when the hardware is built on the backs of underpaid people in the global south. All so people can have little toys of convenience.

It's likely that Apple doesn't care about woman's lives either, for what it's worth. Just the negative PR associated with the problem at hand.

The things you want to "protect" with an invisible AirTag are, at their core "just stuff".

The things being protected by not selling an invisible AirTag are, at their core "people".

I'm not a female, so I don't anticipate a civilian stalking me for really any reason. A non-civilian wouldn't use an airtag.

Zero stalkers are stopped because of airtag policies, since many other devices exist.

People have been stalking each other since long before airtags.

> many other devices exist

So use one of them?

Do you also post complaints that GE Washing machines don't have a built-in method to cook a fucking chicken?

Also, wouldn't this argument apply to the use of AirTags as anti-theft devices? Since AirTag alternatives exist, just use the alternatives devices for anti-theft that also work for stalking. But some people don't do this and just want to use AirTags for anti-theft purposes. Which sort of illustrates my point. Fewer people do a thing when it's harder. No would care that AirTags aren't good for anti-theft if there were alternatives equally as good.

No it doesn't.

No, Apple is prioritizing good publicity. A motivated stalker will just be using another product, which is a net financial negative for Apple. They just don’t want the possibility of the news talking about how someone got assaulted thanks to an Apple device.

But also, I agree that this is about reputational liability more than some higher desire to do good.

The other side of this is that it can't be used to slip into someone's purse as they leave the bar and then be tracked unknowingly.

Apple leaves the door open for manufacturers to implement an anti-theft device into their goods that address both concerns.

Seems just as easy to boost the phone while you're dropping the tag.

There are much better options for vehicle tracking and theft prevention so I would personally prefer it to be harder for thieves or stalkers to track using these very easy to get devices.

I've gotten into photography lately. I'd love to slip an airtag into more places - ideally within the housing of my camera bodies themselves. But, there's not really any room to put an airtag on or in a camera given the current airtag form factor.

You can get camera cages with secret compartments for airtags. And lens caps which take an airtag. But they take up a lot of space, and end up adding a lot of bulk to the camera itself. I wish Apple opened airtags up to 3rd party manufacturers who could buy the (tiny) circuit board directly, so they could hide it in their products better.

All we need to do is get more camera companies to follow suit.

It still takes some space but quite clever

C'mon, this is the same company that sells a $230 sock for your phone. And they sold out of the first batch. Apple knows their market, and some people...don't.

in my case, the damage was so much i wish i had just left it stolen and taken the bigger insurance payout.

But Apple does more stuff as well, like encrypting your phone and making it so even harvesting a stolen phone for parts is unattractive (everything has serial numbers and you can't just swap a part out).

Initially they didn’t have it, people complained, now they do, and people still complain.

Of course, there is an implicit bias with measuring stalking as "peaceful" stalkers who never get caught leave no evidence. Unlike theft which always leaves evidence by its nature (the thing is gone).

This is like nerfing knifes because they can kill people.

So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.

They did have anti-stalking from the start btw. People still complained that it wasn’t good enough so they reduced some of the timings.

My Chipolo certainly still works.

There are [cheap] tags being sold that are compatible with both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub. I would rather have a dual-network device than Apple's improved model.

Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?

Here is an example of dual-network tags:

https://www.amazon.com/Tracker-Locator-Android-Bluetooth-Fin...

https://developer.apple.com/find-my/

> Would it be so difficult for Apple to put a hole in the Airtag so it could be directly attached to a keychain?

Yes. It is surprisingly a near impossible engineering challenge at the levels Apple hardware is being done. Have you even considered the wear and tear that a mere hole in an ABS plastic molded detail would be subjected to over the lifespan of...several years?

(Just kidding, obviously they just want to upsell their customers with extremely overpriced accessories.)

I imagine that Airtag functionality is disabled when Find Hub configures these tags.

I have heard in the commentary here that Chipolo is now making dual-network devices, but only one can be active at a time.

Apple has a larger and more sensitive network, so uses requiring tracking quality would lean that way.

I would prefer to find a tag that can be provisioned on both networks. I don't know if any actually work that way.

I'd also like a tag that would let me take it apart and disable the speaker. For my car, that seems appropriate, if I can also find a placement location which is extremely difficult to access.

Edit: Google is saying that "they generally require switching between networks rather than operating on both simultaneously."

Some ideas for location: behind the glovebox or under the spare tire.

I am planning to purchase one, cut the speaker connection, and put it in my car.

If the Airtag can't reach the thief's phone, it starts chirping by itself within an 8-24 hour window.

There would a. be less dumb criminals around to repeat offend and b. The smarter would-be criminals will do the calculus and and not steal items which could have tags.

You can tell there's an AirTag, and there's no easy way to remove it.

https://www.elevationlab.com/collections/airtag/products/tag...

While this is true, Airtags are not designed for theft prevention, and never have been. They're designed to locate lost items.

Apple should be applauded for making the only tracking tags with literally any kind of anti-stalking features at all.

It would be if stalking happened at the same frequency as property theft, but the rates are ridiculously lopsided.

So much property theft happens that we don't bother reporting almost any of it.

But I'd really, really not like to find out someone was following me around.

I bet Apple could produce some really interesting data from these tools and others that could be used to proactively target stalkers and investigate them before their actions escalate to violence.

Let's get Tom Cruise in here and whoop some ass!

But the impact of the two activities is also lopsided:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_matrix

Stalking can potentially result in rape and death, even if there's a low probability of stalking happening in general.

I don’t think anyone is making a claim that we should live with this according to first principles. I think people are saying this trade-off currently exists because it doesn’t seem to be economically or technologically feasible to solve both well.

How do you propose making an improvement to tracking technology that reduces theft while at the same time not assisting stalking?

One idea: if you report your AirTag as stolen, then it can continue to track the item, but you lose the ability to see where it is. In so doing you hand off tracking capability to some authority. This could be an improvement to the extent that the authority is trustworthy and well behaved. Unfortunately, such properties are not guaranteed across the globe. This would create more incentives for bribery for example.

There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.

I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.

Try running airpods pro against any android phone. Severely degraded experience on purpose to the point of rendering them worse than chinese 10$ aliexpress buds and practically useless. Wife had them, worked fine with iphone mini 13 but she hated iOS with passion so eventually reverted back to samsungs. She had to give airpods pro to her sister who still has apple phone and bought some cheapish buds for 50 bucks which work flawlessly and she is happy again.

Maybe engineers at apple are consistently incompetent to implement basic bluetooth unlike any chinese sweatshop, but somehow I refuse to believe so.

My Samsung SmartTag gives me a notification if the bike changes position and I'm not nearby. Actually giving me a chance to track it down.

This is also quite ridiculous, as it literally gives away that there is an AirTag there. I have seen people removing the speaker to eliminate this flaw.

Time for me to buy my first iPhone then.

Sincerely, f** Google. I've been android user since I had to abandon Symbian, and their impotence in this one thing is staggering.

But basically this means that only items in the high traffic areas can be found.

Ironically, in the light of your post, I migrated my main phone to Pixel (with GrapheneOS due to the additional functionality), but admittedly I dread my potential clash with Google service -- you can't even chargeback them if you're not ready to losing access to EVERYTHING related to Google.

I'd like another way but no other Android vendor offers secure hardware :(

When I was on a walk with my friend, my iPhone constantly nagged me about "AIRPODS ARE MOVING WITH YOU!!!1!" and it showed me the EXACT complete route on the map.. I didn't even ask for it!

When I lost my AirPods (which are ridiculously easy to remove from your iCloud account and Find My: just hold down the pairing button for 30 seconds), it just showed me a vague radius and "Last seen around here 12 hours ago" not even a exact time.

ProTip: Avoid Austin. Property theft everywhere and the cops don't care at all.

I'm pretty sure being able to access an Airtag that was put into stolen mode by the owner is the least of your concern. I'm not even sure what failure mode you are worried about because you didn't elaborate.

Please don't think I'm trying to be all high and mighty because I live in the UK and am surveilled even worse than you are (although at least our police are very rarely armed).

And since the user has the original key, it'd have to be voluntary surrender. After you turn your key in, you lose access.

The best part is the whole thing could be reviewable and added to a public immutable ledger, encrypted, to make the whole process, transition, and access transparent for courts later. Wouldn't it be great if more investigations happened that way?

And if you don't trust law enforcement, thats your prerogative, no need to use the feature.

Can that really be true?

I have requested theft a number of times, even presented video footage. I was surprised they ask you fill out bureaucratic paperwork and at the end they do nothing, after all these taxes we pay in Europe.

I had it delivered to me the next day, but I must have used air tags for checked luggage a 50+ times before.

Had to change batteries a few times.

I have multiple in places like my bike, wallet and so on.

They have paid themselves so many times over and over.

So I’m stoked to hear about a new tag with greater range.

They're cheaper and allows third parties, plus the network is stronger.

  They're cheaper and allows third parties, plus the network is stronger.

I wonder which network is stronger in the UK. There are many recent-ish Android phones with presumably the latest version of Google Play Services. But I don't know if anyone has tried to test, or even to estimate the number of devices.