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Wait so a thieve an eye with an iPhone who steals my expensive bicycle that I have tagged with an airtag Is receiving a notification that there is an airtag "following" them nearby?
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Yes, the moral of the story is - don't steal expensive bikes if you don't want to get spammed by notifications that the bike is following you.
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With the side effect that the thief can easily find and remove the tag.
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Depends on the thief, the object, how well the tracking device is hidden, and how much time the thief has to investigate.

Many dumb thieves out there, like the airport workers who steal luggage and take it home.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=airport...

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They always talk about lost items in their marketing. They don’t talk about theft prevention or finding pets or anything. Gotta go for a mini GPS tracker or something for protecting $$$$(+) bikes (which should never leave one’s sight anyway).
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> They don’t talk about theft prevention or finding pets or anything.

In particular I'm guessing you can't use it to track your kid's backpack either; for that, you should instead buy your 7yo their own iPhone.

> Gotta go for a mini GPS tracker or something for protecting $$$$(+) bikes

The same one actual stalkers would use?

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>The same one actual stalkers would use?

Right, like “cut your dinner with a knife, the one actual murderers would use.”

They had to balance needs of us owners of things and needs of abused partners and the general public. Other trackers have been available long long before AirTags and haven’t gone away since Apple’s introduction.

As it stands, plenty are still very upset about the existence of AirTags. Especially given the ease of disabling the speaker and the lack of Android notifications at launch.

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They've set the nuisance limits just high enough that they work for tracking your kids, I think it has to be away from the owner for 24 hours
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> In particular I'm guessing you can't use it to track your kid's backpack either; for that, you should instead buy your 7yo their own iPhone.

You can - there will be spurious phone notifications and audible notifications.

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Meaning: you can't, because the point of it is to help protect your kid (or, more probably, help find their backpack when they absent-mindedly lose sight of it), not to spam teachers with notifications and disrupt everyone with random beeping.
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If I just say that you’re the smartest person ever will you stop this? Your point has been made over and over again… just like every single time I read you.
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Yes. The alternative is to have stalkers using hidden airtags
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So what good is piercing the AirTag's speaker?
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It stops the audible notifications for people who aren't looking at a phone screen.
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They also ring when a non-associated iphone is moving with them for some time.
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Android users
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Supposedly Apple opened this up to Android already
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They have. I got a warning on my Android phone recently because I was traveling overnight on a train and somebody in a neighboring room had an AirTag.
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