That’s in the article too. It will start beeping when moved if it’s following someone that’s not the owner for a while.
Doesn't help if it's, say, on the undercarriage/trunk of your car.
Or if you cut the wire to the beeper..
So if a thief steals my jacket with an AirTag inside, some time later it’ll start beeping? At which point he’ll discard the AirTag and I won’t be able to track down my jacket. Kinda lame.
You assume that in a counter-factual world, professional thieves can’t learn to check the pockets of stolen jackets? They are already known to use Bluetooth network scanners to identify, eg, cars with electronics stored inside.
How often do you imagine a professional thief stealing a jacket?
I can’t think of many thieves trying to steal jackets, but that was the OP’s hypothetical, not mine.
OP's hypothetical was a thief stealing a jacket. But I would expect that to not be professional territory. You added professional.
OP here. Can confirm. I was not envisioning an Arsène Lupin type character attempting to steal a jacket.
Not if the alert is delayed
Turns out that it is delayed by 3 days.
I think Apple decided preventing people from using Airtags to stalk someone is more important than preventing theft. Makes sense to me, can you imagine a high profile murder occurring because the perp was able to follow them with an airtag?
I could see having a wider window, say 2 days, for reporting itself. That would give you some time to find your stolen stuff, but would still be an expensive pain in the ass for the stalker to rotate that frequently.
You're assuming the stalker is some rando, not, say, a jealous spouse who wants to make sure they really are going to work every day.
I assume it notifies ios users before it starts beeping. Sure that still leaves out android users but there is only so much they can do and there are many other products which do the same thing with 0 safety features.
That's why it's advertised as "find things that got lost" product, and not "find things that got stolen" product (eg. lojack).
If you don’t have an iPhone, your device isn’t assisting the tracker. This is equivalent to being tracked by any one of the many existing such devices.