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.
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.
Would love to know what card tag you’d recommend, I’m after one.
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.
(or the card 5 for wallets)
Their hardware has been exceptional in recent years.
Cramming lots of tech into a small footprint is an extremely complex affair.
But that hasn't been true for a decade. Most improvements have been marginal, and they totally missed the boat on LLMs.
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
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.
Also, my understanding is that AirTags are only usable if you have an iPhone, am I wrong?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bensin/2025/12/11/huaweis-freec...
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.
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.
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.
I would not call that usable.