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I haven't experienced the same issues you describe in terms of random beeping or the like. But I do think one of the most curious and irritating missing pieces
by xoa 5y ago
I haven't experienced the same issues you describe in terms of random beeping or the like. But I do think one of the most curious and irritating missing pieces from AirTags is no sort of tie-in with Family Sharing or some sort of contacts whitelist. I saw one thing saying that was about privacy but that makes zero sense because Apple doesn't do the same thing elsewhere in "Find My" for people or devices. While it's correctly opt-in, once everyone has done so we can see device locations for all of the family's stuff, which is very helpful when somebody is missing their phone or the like (anyone else can help with it) as well as checking in disasters. I don't see why that would be fine but keys wouldn't. In terms of privacy, someone is more likely to have their watch, phone or airpods on them then an Apple Tag frankly. Indeed that's the core logic of Apple Tags, we put down and misplace other random stuff but still have our phones/wearables. It can't be that rare for a family to have multiple vehicles where a certain amount of sharing happens, particularly if it's a pattern like us where the SO and I each have a car but then there is a single old truck that we both use. Family names are on the insurance, legally it's multidriver property. And even good friends/room mates probably share some kinds of property. Whomever has it is responsible for not losing it and thus has an interest in tracking it.
Yeah it's a v1.0, but even so when Apple already has all this infrastructure up strikes me as an odd omission that significantly detracts from the utility for no good end. Even a basic "ignore this tag for a day/week/year/permanently" would at least help sand down a bit of the most irritating notification spam. And worth noting that this sort of thing is a genuine security/privacy issue too: in real security systems, the human factor matters a lot. If people get spammed with noise, they will inevitably end up ignoring it when an actual signal turns up. We've known this forever.
- samatman 5y agoApple still has some weird atomization issues for a company which is going all-in on family stuff. This is the company which ran out a credit card and payments infrastructure with serious fanfare— and, incredibly, no provisions for married people having joint accounts. None, they added it later when dhh and Steve Wozniak made a stink about it.
- Androider 5y agoUsing a shared iPad with a family is a bad experience with all kinds of Apple account issues. Other apps Netflix/Amazon/etc. thankfully provide quick user switching which makes it tolerable.
- mattdeboard 5y agothat's how they get you into buying multiple ipads
- gumby 5y agoA common, shallow, cynical take…no, wait, never mind: it’s correct! OS X has always supported multiple user accounts and I can’t see that ever changing. The I-devices on the other hand are explicitly positioned as personal devices. And I don’t really see that changing either. Nowadays the price of macs has dropped to the point where some of the iPads and phones (!) are more expensive than the cheapest (and perfectly capable) macs (I do my development on a baseline MacBook Air because it’s so conveniently light). So they are still selling (relatively) low cost, multiuser machines.
- samatman 5y ago> And I don’t really see that changing either. So, crystal-ball-gazing time: I don't think this part is true for iPadOS, but it's going to take them a couple more years to really get it right. Here's where I think they're skating: watches and phones are personal devices, Macs remain what they are (personal computers, I could define this but it doesn't seem necessary on HN), and iPads (and HomePods) are family devices. "Modes" and Family Sharing are both brand-new, and I can see effort to merge the two concepts so that you can put the family iPad in "Alice mode" or "Bob mode". Instead of separate user accounts (in MacOS each user sees a personal set of applications, that will never happen on i-anything), iCloud just manages all the login stuff in the background so that each user sees the subset of the system they're allowed, with their personal data and user accounts swapped out transparently. This is a bad fit for how apps and logins work... right now. But Apple is clearly trying to fix that, like I said, I think this will take a couple years at minimum before we actually see it.
- antihero 5y agoYeah until they have family tie in I hardly see the point.
- aldebran 5y agoThis is probably because of 1. You have Bluetooth on all the time 2. If BT is off, the tag isn’t moving at all (including drawer moving open shut)
- pkulak 5y agoI actually assumed this is how it would work. Had absolutely no reason to believe otherwise until my son lost his coat and we needed to get his phone before anyone could find it. I could have just added his coat to my account, but then he'd get stalking alerts all day long. Arg.
- ok_dad 5y agoEven if you could pair the same airtag on two accounts, that would be useful! I don't care if I can directly share things from Find My, but if my wife could add my cat's airtag to her phone also, that would be nice. Seems like a very important feature to have, people have been complaining for almost a year about it, too!