Back in the days, I used to watch Spiderman cartoons, and was amazed by the small trackers Spidey put on people he needed to track, and got the location in real time. I wanted to see something like that someday.
This AirTag does seem very nice in that respect. But then I realize what a gigantic privacy nightmare this can be for a large portion of our population.
Stalkers can put a tracker on you, and you'll never get notified if you don't have an iPhone? What if the user doesn't even have a smartphone?
How does Apple think they'll handle this scenario? Can it even be handled?
The tag will beep after 3 days, then you can tap it with any nfc enabled phone to get the owners contact information, or more probably, throw it in the trash.
I can't believe the level of disconnect some people on HN have with the "other" worlds.
Poor people don't need LEDs? LEDs are the cheapest light source in the long run. The electricity/batteries to run it might be expensive or impossible to get in some places.
Check out this gravity-run light source which is "essentially free" and being used in many places.
They now sell “NowLight”, which you pull on for a minute and it generates enough electricity for 15 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone (or 2 hours of light)
Even if it did, the physics don’t really work. A high end bright LED light draws a few watts. Let’s say the LED uses 1 watt, and the gears are perfectly efficient. One watt-hour is 2655 foot-pounds. Assume the weight is 265 pounds with a 10:1 pulley to lift it. You’d have to pull the rope attached to the pulley 100 feet to charge the light to run for one hour, and the device would need to be 10 foot tall. Figure in mechanical losses, and a more realisitic LED, and you end up multiplying the weight, and pully ratio by ten. Now, the weight is similar to a small car, and you pull the rope 0.2 miles for a one hour charge. Make it 5 foot tall, and the weight and rope double again.
They won't remove it outright but we will get the option to collapse it. I've been using this mode on Canary ever since it landed and I honestly love it. Currently it's hidden behind a flag in pre-release builds but Stable should get it too in a matter of weeks.
We had an old mixer-grinder which ran for a decade or so. After it broke down, I went to an official repair shop, and they quoted an amount which make buying a new one a better option. So we did - from different company. It turned out that the new one constantly gave us problems, but we stuck with it for years. And one day while cleaning up our home, we found the old mixer and gave it to our domestic help to keep if she could get it repaired.
She did get it repaired. For less than a DOLLAR! And it still runs better than the new-fangled mixer.
The email this article is talking about is for users of the Google One subscription only. Of course they'd like their users to know that they can upload full quality photos to Google Photos - that's one of the main reasons I bought the subscription too!
Disclosure: I work at Google, but had bought the subscription before joining.
This AirTag does seem very nice in that respect. But then I realize what a gigantic privacy nightmare this can be for a large portion of our population.
Stalkers can put a tracker on you, and you'll never get notified if you don't have an iPhone? What if the user doesn't even have a smartphone?
How does Apple think they'll handle this scenario? Can it even be handled?