![]() ![]() There are more reasons than price to be wary, of course. If you're a Tile Premium subscriber you get free battery replacements every year, but that does mean paying a monthly or annual service fee. Once the battery in your Tile Slim starts to lose charge, that's it: you can't top it up, and you can't swap it out yourself. The downside is that it's not user-replaceable. That's just too narrow for an off-the-shelf battery, and so Tile uses a custom battery which lasts for up to three years. However it would also have to be much thinner: we've seen how that works with Tile Slim, which the company says is the thickness of two credit cards. Still, it does present an issue for alternative form-factors.Ī credit card shaped AirTag, designed to fit into a wallet, purse, or luggage tag, could be much wider than the current, button-like tracker. ![]() An AirTag itself is hardly larger than that battery, in fact. Instead, though, it opted for a CR2032 button cell battery: widely-available, inexpensive, and easy to replace. You can see how that works by looking inside the tiny casing of an AirPod. After all, that approach makes waterproofing simpler, and it would also have allowed for a non-standard battery which could've made the tracker itself smaller. I don't think anybody would've been too surprised had Apple decided to take the easy option, and the one that in the long-term would be most lucrative, and completely sealed its AirTag design. One of the most pleasing aspects of AirTags and, frankly, the most surprising is that the battery is user-replaceable. There are bigger challenges than just reworking the U1 hardware – Bluetooth, Ultra Wideband, and all – into a flatter form-factor, mind. Obviously Apple would need to change some things in order to make a shape switch like that possible. The absence of that today raises the question of Apple's longer-term plans for its tracking range, and whether it intends for this initial AirTag to be a standalone product or part of a family of devices offering the same core Find My location services. What I need – and what I suspect a lot of people will want – is a version of AirTag shaped like a credit card. Mine isn't even that skinny, just a regular leather wallet those who've jumped on the slimline card-holder trend will find it even more incompatible with this first AirTag's dimensions. Like a round peg in a square hole, the AirTag just isn't designed to comfortably nestle into a traditional bifold wallet. ![]()
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