[bolognafairy]

My experience is that this is rarely true in reality. I live in a freestanding house in a suburban area (not in the US, let alone SF). I’ve moved a couple of times since I’ve started using AirTags. Even when none of my own devices have been around, I still manage to get quite frequent location updates.

[lolinder]

How frequent is frequent?

For the use case of identifying where they are on a map, I can certainly believe that an iPhone will connect more often than you move the object the tag is attached to. But when it comes time to actually trigger a sound to find it stuck under a cushion or what have you, is there going to be an iPhone within range at that moment?

[NavinF]

That's a very unusual use case. When one of my airtags is in my building I can locate it with ~0.1ft precision using UWB. No matter how many other iPhones are in the building I can't get <100ft precision without UWB.

The difference between "airtag is in under the top left corner of the couch cushion" and "airtag might be in the same building as you" is so large that I wonder why you don't get a old used iPhone and swap the battery to create a functional phone.

[lolinder]

I'm not OP. I've got an iPhone and two iPads and a Mac in the house. I'm asking for OP, who has no i-devices and wants to know if an airtag would be useful anyway.

> Can I buy an AirTag, initialize it with the help of a friend who has an iPhone, and then locate the AirTag or ring it from my PC with this Python lib?

Ringing it might be an unusual case for you, but it's exactly what OP was asking about.

(It's also by far the most common use case for this category of device for me. I misplace things all the time and it's super convenient to not have to wander all over the house looking for it.)