Apple Inc.’s AirTag
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Gotta give it to Apple Inc. with AirTag. The basic idea is not new. Tile has been doing it for years. New technology aside (UWB vs. Bluetooth), Apple managed to come up with an even more thoughtful way of doing it, and in a way that leverages Apple’s uniquely large network of iPhones — something that Tile cannot fully copy (but maybe Samsung can).
Sure, AirTag’s price is nearly double that of Tile’s for the hardware, but given the thought that went into the whole system and the fact that you don’t have to pay any annual subscription fees (required by Tiles to get some advanced features), I’m starting to think that the premium might actually be worth it.
And the end-user can replace the battery in the AirTag. Apple has not released any batter-powered product that let the end-user replace the batteries for very long time. Now it has.
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In my MBA program our capstone project (product) was a small Bluetooth low energy device that would alert parents when kids come home from school, or if grandpa joe wanders off. While we ended up winning a number of business plan competitions and even filed for patent protection on it... we abandoned the idea knowing companies like Apple (or even Tile) would crush us like the cockroaches we were.
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@89th said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
... we abandoned the idea knowing companies like Apple (or even Tile) would crush us like the cockroaches we were.
Cannot think like that. Just about any idea anyone can come up with, there is always already a company or institution that in theory can “crush” it. If you really want to do something, just roll the dice and do it anyway, high probability of failure notwithstanding.
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These devices send the location of your AirTag to iCloud
Why THE FUCK do they need to upload that data to their servers? I for one don't want Apple to know where my stuff is.
Only you can see where your AirTag is. Your location data and history are never stored on the AirTag itself. Devices that relay the location of your AirTag also stay anonymous, and that location data is encrypted every step of the way. So not even Apple knows the location of your AirTag or the identity of the device that helps find it.
Sounds like BS to me. Everything leaves a trace on the internet. IP addresses, digital fingerprints, etc. Also, even if they try to maintain privacy in their current version of the software, I assume they could at anytime, either accidentally or deliberately, update the software to reveal as much information as they want.
If they were serious about privacy, they wouldn't upload anything to the cloud. Local things can be done locally, and for the "I lost my stuff" scenario where somebody else's device is supposed to signal the position, an infrastructure like the Tor network could be used to do this in a decentralized, anonymous way. Or the tag could simply contain an anonymous email address for receiving "found" messages. There would be a million ways offer these services without using any Apple cloud services.
@Axtremus do you know how the direction thing works? How do they know the direction from which the signal came?
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@george-k said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
@klaus said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
How do they know the direction from which the signal came?
My understanding is that it's the U1 chip in the iPhone 11 and 12.
Maybe, but if you have just an antenna and you receive a signal, you have no clue where the signal comes from. One would need a directional antenna and a rotation mechanism, somewhat similar to radar.
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Don’t know how Apple does this exactly, but maybe you can get some idea about what is possible from a paper like this: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/20/4466
Assuming you have access to large troves of academic research publications, search for “single channel ultra wide band direction finding.”
I kind of zeroed in on “single channel” because I don’t know how many UWB antennae Apple puts in an iPhone. So for the worst case I assume one antenna.
I further speculate that in spaces where there are multiple Apple devices present (iPhones, iPads, Macs, HomePods, etc.), when there are multiple such devices are UWB capable, Apple can treat them as a distributed antenna array and deploy location/directional finding algorithms that take advantage of multiple antennae. This can also partially answer the question of why using a centralized server.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@mark said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
I predict failure in the marketplace for this POS.
Entirely possible ... don’t know how well something like this will perform in real life yet. Might turn out like the Apple Watch’s EKG function where medical professionals like George would look at it and laugh.
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@axtremus said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
EKG function where medical professionals like George would look at it and laugh
Actually, it's very good for what it does. Detect rhythm and nothing else. It's functionally the same as the KardiaMobile device you see advertised. Probably (but perhaps could) won't detect a heart attack, but it'll detect all kinds of nasty arrhythmias.
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@george-k said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
@mark said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
I predict failure in the marketplace for this POS.
Tell that to the folks at Tile.
Do you own a Tile? Do you know people who do?
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@mark said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
Do you own a Tile?
Nope. I tend to not lose things.
Do you know people who do?
D3 has about 5 of them. She loves them.
D3 and D4 have Apple watches as well. When you have a 2 year old running around, and you put your phone down, the ability to "ping" your phone from the watch is very useful.
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@axtremus said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
Don’t know how Apple does this exactly, but maybe you can get some idea about what is possible from a paper like this: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/20/4466
Assuming you have access to large troves of academic research publications, search for “single channel ultra wide band direction finding.”
I kind of zeroed in on “single channel” because I don’t know how many UWB antennae Apple puts in an iPhone. So for the worst case I assume one antenna.
I further speculate that in spaces where there are multiple Apple devices present (iPhones, iPads, Macs, HomePods, etc.), when there are multiple such devices are UWB capable, Apple can treat them as a distributed antenna array and deploy location/directional finding algorithms that take advantage of multiple antennae. This can also partially answer the question of why using a centralized server.
That's interesting.
The way I understand it is that the device, such as the AirTag, sends an impulse and then the receiver receives the impulse multiple times - once from the straight line path, then from reflections. The angle can then somehow be estimated from the strength and delays between the received signals? But I completely fail to understand how the "somehow" can work. How can you ever get a direction vector out of this?
In that particular paper, they seem to require measurements within a room (by robots or something) to get a kind of profile, that they can feed into a neural network for predicting direction from impulse responses.
But that's not how the AirTag can work, because obviously you won't use robots to get a profile of all the rooms you work in.
But the report mentions that other methods include the usage of multiple antennas and, according to the report, it seems to be standard to have more than one antenna in a device. I can see how that works with two antennas. Maybe that's how AirTag works?
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@mark said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
@george-k said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
@mark said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
I predict failure in the marketplace for this POS.
Tell that to the folks at Tile.
Do you own a Tile? Do you know people who do?
Ayup. I bought them for MFR who was continually misplacing her keys. She never really got the hang of using it. Technophobia.
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@george-k said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
Accessory:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX8A2AM/A/airtag-hermès-luggage-tag
$449?!?!?! I could buy the luggage and everything in it for less!
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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@george-k said in Apple Inc.’s AirTag:
Accessory:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX8A2AM/A/airtag-hermès-luggage-tag
If ever there was a proper usage for the term "lolwut", this is it.
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Looks like a fantastic product, thanks for posting about it, Ax. I'll get some for my mom and my wife and myself. But they're selling like hotcakes and not currently available from apple's website. Apparently the word is out about this extraordinarily useful product.
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