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Imagine you put an AirTag somewhere deep into your suitcase, and someone malicious steals it and then drives off with it. With the current model, the thief will
by radicality 2y ago
Imagine you put an AirTag somewhere deep into your suitcase, and someone malicious steals it and then drives off with it. With the current model, the thief will get notified there’s an AirTag traveling with them, and they can play a sound, find it and remove it / disable it.
Imo without these features it would be rather unlikely for a thief to find AirTags quickly or even realize it’s there.
The ~40ft range is more than enough, the global mesh network of all iPhones is the whole point of the AirTags, there’s no “gps fix”.
- ryukoposting 2y agoSo we're in agreement about the technical situation at hand - rely on nearby devices' location data. This should work fine in most airports, sure. I'm still stuck on all of the friction involved in actually using airtags as a theft recovery device. Neither the tag or Apple's service can contact police or airport security on its own, so you're spending who-knows-how-long flagging down security, explaining the situation, and waiting for them to relay that message back to an appropriate authority who will go find the thief. Alternatively, you skip the "talk to security" part entirely and go find the thief yourself (assuming you're comfortable with that sort of confrontation). You're still dealing with a moving target - one that can very easily leave the airport entirely, forcing you to choose between sacrificing your bag and potentially missing your flight, a cab, etc. You also run into a proliferation issue. The more popular airtags become as a theft-recovery device, the more thieves will know to look for them and remove them from stolen items.