Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.
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.
I have a third-party tracker and the AirTag in my bicycle. The third-party tracker has no clue what it’s doing or meant to do. But then again, the AirTag is completely inaudible in a decently-sized bicycle parking garage.
i thought so too, but in practice i've been getting much better battery life from the official airtag on my keychain, than i do from the "atuvos" trackers that see much less use. high-precision UWB finding and half as many coin cells used makes the airtag an easy choice over the cheaper trackers for me.
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.
There is a lot of variance amongst third party/clone tags. I had some grey plastic losanges for a while they were junk and all ended up in the trash. Now I have a bunch of Hoco tags and they’re decent (especially for the price)
Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.
i've got the"ATUVOS Air Tracker Tag Card Wallet Tracker", purchased november 2023 and it's still going strong.
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.
The reliability of the other brands are quite poor though. I've tried Tile, I've tried Pebble (using Google's network) and neither has worked reliability enough. So I ended up switching to AirTags and so far I have been impressed with the reliability - it works 100% of the time which is not something I could say about Tile nor Pebble/Google.
Yep, Tile I believe is the only third party service that exists. All other trackers either plug into "Apple Find My" or "Android Find My Device" network. There's finally starting to be a few devices that can do both, but they're rare, so make sure you get the right one when buying. But they take 10s to setup and it's very smooth.
Stupid form factor, though. Need to buy extra accessories to be able to actually mount it to anything, but I guess that's the Apple way. Why not have a hole to put a rope or anything through?
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
yes, apple has a LOT of hidden complexity. Another example is their dongles - many of them have significant processing power, like video conversion chips inside the shell.
Airpods are a great example of good UX making things seem simple. There's a ridiculous amount of engineering that goes into making them work as well as they do.
To be fair, I think everyone but Google has been missing the boat on LLMs as platform integrations.
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
LLMs are way outside their lane. With that said they've been focused on the underlying components to enable LLMs since way before ChatGPT was on the scene: Unified Memory, Neural Accelerator, even Spotlight counts (as a data source), etc...
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.
Why should Apple care about LLMs? They missed the boat on cloud, cryptocurrencies and on search engines. So what? It's not their business - they can just license a good offering and move on to what they do best : Products.
That just work. I know it sounds simple but if you have been burned by Bluetooth devices before again and again get unburned by AirPods. Also, they stick in my ear even though all other headsets with cable fell out. I don´t know how
I've never had any 'not work'. Sorry.
My Huawei Freeclip 2 are fantastic and a very different form factor Apple doesn't offer sadly. Great for urban walks and listening to podcasts while still being able to hear your surroundings.
Maybe I got lucky, but I never had issues with my Bose, Shokz, or even with my Soundcore headphones and bluetooth. I don't use in ear, so I can not comment on that.
Yep but with AirPods, you are listening music or watching a video, on your Mac, your iPhone rings (on your AirPods), you accept the call, and now the video is paused on your Mac and your AirPods are already connected to your iPhone.
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.
That is a great point. Airdrop on my iphone currently has this weird bug where if I try and airdrop directly to a target (eg my laptop) it doesn't work, but if I go into airdrop and select the exact same target, works fine. This is even weirder because it's followed me between phones (I restored from icloud backup). Yet, yeah, my airpods are fine at switching.
From what I've read, it's an accumulation of small details.
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.
I've had Bose 700s, Sennheisers, Anker Soundcore, and probably other bluetooth earbuds and none of them come close to the simplicity of the Airpods. The Bluetooth handoff and pairing is insanely easy and works within a second or two. I've never once had to go to Bluetooth settings to force it to pair.
This is the opposite of my experience. AirPods refusing to connect, randomly disconnecting, pressing "pause" on my phone only to have "play" instead invoke Apple Music on my Mac, and so forth. There are tons of "smart" features built into these that make the experience worse than I've had on normal, bluetooth headphones.
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.
That is correct. With the iPhone at home, you keep getting "Unknown tracker found travelling with you" spam on your Android, and the AirTag rings occasionally.
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.