The lack of loophole was disorienting, but then I went and looked up how they want you to attach it, and the hangtag accessories look so pretty https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-introduces-airt... -- things like the appearance and the sound quality really show a commitment to making polished products rather than practical ones. I've been fairly negative on Apple for a few years and they still need to pull bigger rabbits out of their hat until I completely reverse that, but it's really impressive that they've turned a Tile into a status symbol.
It's hilarious to a certain extent that they built the thing smaller than all the competition and bulk it up with a wad of leather anyhow.
> It's hilarious to a certain extent that they built the thing smaller than all the competition and bulk it up with a wad of leather anyhow.
That's essentially how I feel when I see the "Our thinnest iPhone ever" slide knowing that 95% of iPhone owners put it in a bulky case. That said, that's not unique to Apple and the phone is at least usable without a case.
People debate if Apple is about primarily hardware or software but I posit their forte is marketing. They make good products but also consistently beat out superior competition by engineering desirability.
A little off-topic, but can an artistic person or graphic designer help me to understand why every airtag in Apple's literature with the Apple logo has that two-color (light gray, dark gray) scheme with a not-exactly-straight line dividing the colors [1]? It seems like an odd design choice.
EDIT: Ha! Thanks for the push. I would have never seen it. My eyes are broken I guess. It truly looks to me like they are two-toned gray, even after the explanation.
Sheesh, those are costly. $35 usd is more than two weeks worth of groceries, two months of a world of Warcraft subscription, and about the same price as any of Affinity's products. For the AirTag, I'd admit that it seems sophisticated enough to warrant it. But the loop to affix it!?
I'm going to buy AirTags and 100% disagree. I will likely print a complete enclosure because the accessories they sell are expensive, look stupid and will still scratch the tags up like mad (will I resell them? probably not, but still).
> But why bother putting a real driver in here at all? Magnets not only add weight, they take up a lot of space. Looks like one corner Apple refused to cut on this tiny disk is sound quality.
I find it fascinating what tradeoffs are decided upon. Apple is arguably the best luxury brand in the world - and this is why.
What are the practical ramifications of Apple harnessing every existing iPhone as an AirTag discovery device in the Find My network? (I think it's awful from a privacy and device-ownership standpoint, but let's leave that aside.)
For instance, because physics is real, it must take some amount of battery power & data transfer to collect information about nearby AirTags. Suppose I walk into Disneyland on a summer weekend with an iPhone. The place is going to be full of AirTags. Assumedly my iPhone will be very busy reporting on their location. Hour by hour, how does that workload compare to the stuff I ask my phone to do for me (e.g., receive text messages, download mail)? Will it run down the battery / chew up bandwidth caps in any significant way?
The AirTag transmits every 2 seconds. The iPhone should scan every 2 minutes for 2 seconds in order to capture the AirTag. BLE scanning costs about ~20mW. So the average power consumption is 20mW * (2sec / 120sec) = 0.3mW.
Over an entire day, it's 7mWh. The iPhone 12 battery is 10000mWh.
> Communication with the Find My network is end-to-end encrypted so that only the owner of a device has access to its location data, and no one, including Apple, knows the identity or location of any device that helped find it.
I'm not sure how the e2ee works out when using Find My in the browser, but that's a different topic, I guess.
edit:
> This entire interaction is end-to-end encrypted, anonymous, and designed to be battery and data efficient, so there is minimal impact on battery life mobile data plan usage and user privacy is protected.
Are the iPhones always tracking and reporting? Or are they just watching passively for the devices reported lost and only reporting the location to Apple of your own AirTags. The latter seems far more sensible. The battery cost of this is fairly trivial. Your phone is already capturing its location and reporting for FindMy. The incremental cost of attaching the AirTag’s location is minimal. To monitor BLE for a bunch of addresses is also minimal cost that’s typically predominantly done within the BT chip to avoid waking the SoC. At first glance there are some details that are unclear here in terms of how they scale this. For example, at Apple scale, the total size of lost AirTags is quite large, larger than what you can typically offload to a BLE chip. Similarly, the privacy protection features mean that BLE addresses rotate so just passively scanning wouldn’t be sufficient. My bet though is that that’s the work that was done - offloading all of this to the BLE chip in ways that are friendly to the HW capabilities. It’s also entirely possible they worked with their BT supplier to add the necessary low-level hooks to make that perform well and preserve privacy.
I would say those AirTags will be with the iPhones of their respective owners. Mine report as “With you” so perhaps they don’t advertise themselves in this state. The phone will be frequently updating its own location to Find My anyway so no extra power draw.
However if you’re walking by a set of left luggage lockers or through some similar environment where lots of AirTags not with their owner then there would indeed be some overhead. If you work in baggage handling in an airport would probably be telling.
This all depends on the frequency which the AirTag reports itself and the frequency where your iPhone listens out. I suspect the impact would be negligible considering the power draw of the U1 in the AirTag is of order the power draw that the phone must commit.
I’m assuming AirTags just send out Bluetooth advertising packets. Your phone is continuously listening for those anyway to detect devices you own, like your watch and headphone. So that part is “free”.
The power required to process the packet is negligible.
Sending the data back to Apple
could be more significant. But I guess that’s only of the AirTag is “lost”, and probably as part of a bundle of data sent regularly anyway, probably when asking Apple servers about new notifications. What takes power is waking up from sleep to send data. If the CPU is already awake, taking a few extra microseconds to transmit a few more bytes of data is nothing.
So really, I don’t think the energy and data it’s using is anything to be concerned about. It’s a drop in the bucket.
At first glance, I'd say the resource consumption is actually going to be basically negligible. The Bluetooth and GPS radios would probably be on anyway, and the packets flow through the air anyway, so just making a note of the IDs you see, batching them, and sending that every hour or so, is not going to be very heavy.
I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that their guiding principle with this was as it is with every other portable device they have now - make it as small as practically possible and let people extend it if and how they want[1] to.
Saves a little bit of material, makes manufacturing a little less complicated, and makes the accessory ecosystem a whole lot more appealing.
1. I don’t carry a keychain, for example, but I’ll slip one in each of my bags.
Beside the size it's probably a tradeoff on mechanical integrity: a keyring can introduce immense mechanical stress. On my last tag the small loophole just broke away after a year on a key that was not used daily or in harsh environments. With the AirTag you can just replace a $2 third party accessory. Apple didn't have to engineer a very durable (maybe milled?) loophole, which would have increased cost.
While ifixit did drill a hole, we have no way of knowing how durable that hole will be. The drill point looked pretty close to the edge, simple fatigue may snap the hole quite quickly.
Because it's not going to be $13, you'll surely be able to buy 5 for $6 off Amazon soon for whatever kind of holder-with-loophole you want.
People love customizing their things. Some people will need large holes, other tiny ones, depending on what they're attaching it to. Some will want to make their AirTag bigger and bulkier, others not.
In this case I think Apple made the absolutely right decision.
I think it has as many non-loophole uses as loophole uses, so I can see why they chose to cut down on bulk there. I put one in my wallet and one in a small internal pocket in my bag, neither are actually attached.
I can't remember the last time I actually lost my bag or my wallet, but these are definitely pretty fun.
Additionally, the nice thing about the keyring is that the airtag is parallel to the keychain loop, while with a keyring its perpendicular - to me this is huge in terms of comfort on my keychain
Disappointed that this teardown was more of a teaser without any PCB photos. Here are some YouTube videos that feature a better look at the PCB of the AirTag:
Only video [1] went all the way and removed the PCB from the plastic case, revealing what seems to be an NFC antenna facing the plastic dome. Unfortunately, they struggled with removing the plastic carrier and broke the board in two.
> From 1997 to 2010, an estimated 40,400 children aged <13 years were treated in hospital emergency departments (EDs) for battery-related injuries, including confirmed or possible battery ingestions. Nearly three quarters of the injuries involved children aged ≤4 years; 10% required hospitalization. Battery type was reported for 69% of cases, and of those, button batteries were implicated in 58%. Fourteen fatal injuries were identified in children ranging in age from 7 months to 3 years during 1995–2010. Battery type was reported in 12 of these cases; all involved button batteries.
I assume drilling a hole in an air tag would pretty much completely compromise its water resistance?
That would be a pretty big drawback to using it on a key ring. I don’t have to pull my keys out much any more, but I think they still end up exposed to water once in a while.
I wouldn't want to use their hack for drilling a hole - not because of the risk or loss of water resistance but because the edge of the hole isn't going to have great structural strength and will likely crack and let the keyring out. You'd also probably want to get some small split rings to use with that hole, then connect one of those to anything else.
I'm really hoping AirTags put some downward pressure on the tracker industry. There's an outrageous markup on most other trackers like Tile. Maybe if people can get AirTags for $30 Tile will stop pretending their $3 plastic squares are worth $25.
I assume you would need multiple beacons for that? Are they using the phone as a single beacon? Wouldn't this just give you a radius rather than a location?
Unfortunate to see this use the history api incorrectly to the point that it prevents you from hitting the back button and going to the page you came from.
Do people actually need to use these things? Maybe I'm weird, but when young, I had drilled into me Benjamin Franklin's "A place for Everything, and Everything in its Place". If I can't remember where I put something, then I suspect Bigger (medical) Problems are on the horizon... (!)
There have been over 30 million tiles sold worldwide, so there’s a sizable market. Many people are distracted and absentmindedly will leave valuables behind or in odd places, sunglasses, keys, wallets, umbrellas, hats, remote controls. Most of this is stuff on your person. Even if you have a proper place, sometimes stuff just drops out of pockets or bags.
I had a tile, and I might get one of these, since the UI of the Tile app was just a hot/cold thing back when my Tile worked, and this claims to offer an arrow, which is nifty.
As for why: My laptop bag. Not my laptop, I know where that is at all times, but surprisingly often I'll leave my laptop bag in an environment (think an onsite visit, hot desks, etc) where someone will helpfully "place it out of sight" if I have to walk way for a while. It doesn't happen every day, and of course, right now it happens zero times, but if I ever return to that sort of scenario, it's nice to be able to find my bag if it's moved for me. If I completely lose the bag, it's not that big of a deal, but if I can quickly find it with some electronic help, then great.
[+] [-] caturopath|4 years ago|reply
It's hilarious to a certain extent that they built the thing smaller than all the competition and bulk it up with a wad of leather anyhow.
[+] [-] Exmoor|4 years ago|reply
That's essentially how I feel when I see the "Our thinnest iPhone ever" slide knowing that 95% of iPhone owners put it in a bulky case. That said, that's not unique to Apple and the phone is at least usable without a case.
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: Ha! Thanks for the push. I would have never seen it. My eyes are broken I guess. It truly looks to me like they are two-toned gray, even after the explanation.
1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/accessories/st...
[+] [-] brailsafe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|4 years ago|reply
I'm going to buy AirTags and 100% disagree. I will likely print a complete enclosure because the accessories they sell are expensive, look stupid and will still scratch the tags up like mad (will I resell them? probably not, but still).
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jpoliachik|4 years ago|reply
I find it fascinating what tradeoffs are decided upon. Apple is arguably the best luxury brand in the world - and this is why.
[+] [-] threepio|4 years ago|reply
For instance, because physics is real, it must take some amount of battery power & data transfer to collect information about nearby AirTags. Suppose I walk into Disneyland on a summer weekend with an iPhone. The place is going to be full of AirTags. Assumedly my iPhone will be very busy reporting on their location. Hour by hour, how does that workload compare to the stuff I ask my phone to do for me (e.g., receive text messages, download mail)? Will it run down the battery / chew up bandwidth caps in any significant way?
[+] [-] mirths|4 years ago|reply
Over an entire day, it's 7mWh. The iPhone 12 battery is 10000mWh.
Conclusion: it's neglibile.
[+] [-] ylk|4 years ago|reply
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-introduces-airt...
In case you care about details: https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/security/sec60fd770ba/... https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/security/secd4ab33e5c/...
I'm not sure how the e2ee works out when using Find My in the browser, but that's a different topic, I guess.
edit:
> This entire interaction is end-to-end encrypted, anonymous, and designed to be battery and data efficient, so there is minimal impact on battery life mobile data plan usage and user privacy is protected.
https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...
[+] [-] vlovich123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knolan|4 years ago|reply
However if you’re walking by a set of left luggage lockers or through some similar environment where lots of AirTags not with their owner then there would indeed be some overhead. If you work in baggage handling in an airport would probably be telling. This all depends on the frequency which the AirTag reports itself and the frequency where your iPhone listens out. I suspect the impact would be negligible considering the power draw of the U1 in the AirTag is of order the power draw that the phone must commit.
[+] [-] audunw|4 years ago|reply
The power required to process the packet is negligible.
Sending the data back to Apple could be more significant. But I guess that’s only of the AirTag is “lost”, and probably as part of a bundle of data sent regularly anyway, probably when asking Apple servers about new notifications. What takes power is waking up from sleep to send data. If the CPU is already awake, taking a few extra microseconds to transmit a few more bytes of data is nothing.
So really, I don’t think the energy and data it’s using is anything to be concerned about. It’s a drop in the bucket.
[+] [-] cprecioso|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoorishBears|4 years ago|reply
Why is that so?
[+] [-] jvanderbot|4 years ago|reply
Repair.org and ifixit are two sides of my favorite coin right now.
[+] [-] fastball|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fblp|4 years ago|reply
The fact that fixit has gone out and shown how you can add a loophole rather than wasting $13 on an accessory is a bit of a facepalm moment.
[+] [-] culturestate|4 years ago|reply
Saves a little bit of material, makes manufacturing a little less complicated, and makes the accessory ecosystem a whole lot more appealing.
1. I don’t carry a keychain, for example, but I’ll slip one in each of my bags.
[+] [-] texec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan1234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|4 years ago|reply
People love customizing their things. Some people will need large holes, other tiny ones, depending on what they're attaching it to. Some will want to make their AirTag bigger and bulkier, others not.
In this case I think Apple made the absolutely right decision.
[+] [-] NationalPark|4 years ago|reply
I can't remember the last time I actually lost my bag or my wallet, but these are definitely pretty fun.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fastball|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vineyardmike|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffggvv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirthflat83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|4 years ago|reply
Now, throw it in a glass of water for an hour.
I'd be amazed if it didn't trash the IPx7 rating, which is an AirTags differentiator over Tile.
[+] [-] zxcvgm|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63dJ5ytz37w
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1-iKyVyLfU
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeytpQcUHSw
Only video [1] went all the way and removed the PCB from the plastic case, revealing what seems to be an NFC antenna facing the plastic dome. Unfortunately, they struggled with removing the plastic carrier and broke the board in two.
[+] [-] lbebber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|4 years ago|reply
I'm a little bit uncomfortable about this, because it gives access to a coin cell battery.
People under-estimate how dangerous batteries can be.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6134a1.htm
> From 1997 to 2010, an estimated 40,400 children aged <13 years were treated in hospital emergency departments (EDs) for battery-related injuries, including confirmed or possible battery ingestions. Nearly three quarters of the injuries involved children aged ≤4 years; 10% required hospitalization. Battery type was reported for 69% of cases, and of those, button batteries were implicated in 58%. Fourteen fatal injuries were identified in children ranging in age from 7 months to 3 years during 1995–2010. Battery type was reported in 12 of these cases; all involved button batteries.
[+] [-] jmull|4 years ago|reply
That would be a pretty big drawback to using it on a key ring. I don’t have to pull my keys out much any more, but I think they still end up exposed to water once in a while.
[+] [-] fencepost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirthflat83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smiley1437|4 years ago|reply
I can practically guarantee these things will be swallowed if the ridiculous people who eat Tide Pods are anything to go on...
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|4 years ago|reply
Are they using UWB for RF localization?
I assume you would need multiple beacons for that? Are they using the phone as a single beacon? Wouldn't this just give you a radius rather than a location?
[+] [-] johne20|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judge2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lloydatkinson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
How sad in how true it is
[+] [-] Kye|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeorgeTirebiter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] audunw|4 years ago|reply
I wish AirPods acted as airtags. Those are the only other things I’m kind of worried about losing. Mostly because we have small kids.
Maybe I’ll hide one in our bikes as a low effort way to track them in case of theft.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banana_giraffe|4 years ago|reply
As for why: My laptop bag. Not my laptop, I know where that is at all times, but surprisingly often I'll leave my laptop bag in an environment (think an onsite visit, hot desks, etc) where someone will helpfully "place it out of sight" if I have to walk way for a while. It doesn't happen every day, and of course, right now it happens zero times, but if I ever return to that sort of scenario, it's nice to be able to find my bag if it's moved for me. If I completely lose the bag, it's not that big of a deal, but if I can quickly find it with some electronic help, then great.
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theonemind|4 years ago|reply