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minton

> Designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets, the new AirTag incorporates…

Interesting to call out that it’s not designed for pets. I know several people with AirTags on their pet collars.

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Legal reason, perhaps?

Apple doesn't, maybe, want to explain why these are for tracking the living?

Not that you asked, but re: this conversation, I looked at AirTags for cat use and ultimately settled on the TabCat tracker instead. It's pricier, but built for the purpose- the device that goes on the collar is very lightweight and small, and the tracker will guide you via sound right to the cat without the need for relay from other devices like an AirTag. Months of battery life, too.

AirTags have always been "meh" about "finding" anything in motion. And by that I mean the up close "locate this device". I ASSUME it has to do with the fact that its trying to create a multiple point triangulation using only a single device (eg the phone you are on).

Even an airtag moving a little bit, will give you warnings in find my.

why not pets?

I think mostly it's a chew risk for dogs and won't help if the dog is far from the AirTag network. I still have one on my dog anyway (he's not a chewer) and my daughter puts one on her cat occasionally. (Both pets are microchipped too, of course.)

I bought one for my cat, never did help with finding him, just the general area.

They're not great for tracking things that move on their own, or things that avoid people.

We use them on our cats and have found the trouble-maker cat 3 times out of 3 when needed (in an urban apartment area; most recently the cat was scared by a noise which may have kept her hidden out all night in the cold, unless we had found her/shooed her back to the house)

we have them for our cats, they're great. Sometimes they're hiding in bushes and we don't realize they're 10 ft away. Other times they're down by the neighbor's house. It's not perfect but it tells us which direction more or less. And definitely more peace of mind if they ever got lost. They

They make breakaway collars so if they get caught on something it won't trap them.

Can't compete with a Tractive, though.

1. they way the network works, it works better for inanimate objects that don't move around

2. they contain small parts that pets might inadvertently eat, and some of the collars that exist for them have been known to snag on things and entrap pets.

They work best for things that a human has to move, and since a good chunk of humans (at least in US/CA) have iPhones, the movement of the physical thing will be tracked by an iPhone fairly reliably. Any time the critter is outside the range of an i-device picking it up the location will be stale. There isn't really a way around that, since GPS/5G radios are a lot more power hungry than the occasional bluetooth pings an airtag broadcasts.

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