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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

I've always been sceptical of this working well enough to be usable. Does the average iphone owner leave their bluetooth, gps, and mobile network on 24/7? Sounds like an awful waste of power. What about in the rest of the world outside the US, Canada and Australia where Android is the market leader and iphones are rather rare?

What happens inside buildings when the phone doesn't have a fix? Does it store the tag's key and sends it as soon as it gets gps data?

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> Does the average iphone owner leave their bluetooth, gps, and mobile network on 24/7?

Absolutely, yes.

> What happens inside buildings when the phone doesn't have a fix?

Have you never used your phone inside a building before? It still has a very good idea of your location, it doesn't rely solely on GPS signals.

Why wouldn't you leave those things on? Apple designed iOS for those things to be handled and turned on when needed. BLE is quite low in power, GPS is only on when location services need it. These are concerns I would have had about 10-15 years ago, but I don't now.

> Does the average iphone owner leave their bluetooth, gps, and mobile network on 24/7?

Yes of course. That's how these phones are supposed to work. I don't have time to micromanage my devices. As long as I get a day of usage, why would I bother?

AirTags exist and they work perfectly fine in all these conditions. We would need to turn the clock back a few years for this comment to make sense, in an universe where AirTags didn't yet exist.

Your phone takes it's last position from GPS, refines it with RSSI of nearby WiFi networks and then you add in the broadband stuff they have to localize the tag further.

I’ve just moved to Spain, from Canada, and was wondering the same. A quick google search shows iPhone has less than 12% market share here. I did a little test in Valencia about a week ago by just walking around with my AirTag on my keys in “lost mode” and they got picked up very frequently. I was pretty happy with the results, I don’t think approximately only one in ten people on the streets having an iPhone would have much effect on the usefulness.

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