They are already pretty worthless as far as air travel goes in my experience. Airtag indicated my bag was on the tarmac at the first airport pretty much until it dropped in front of me in the baggage carriage at the last airport. Effectively it gives me zero information I didn't have already from the old analog method of using ones eyes and following up with airline staff.
Their utility is directly tied to how many Apple devices with gps and data are in close proximity to them.
I get significantly better responsiveness from them at an Australian airport or Singapore airport than I do at Bangkok airport. That doesn't mean they don't work, it just means it's unrealistic to expect minimum wage baggage handlers in Thailand to have an iPhone in their pocket.
What about baggage handlers at two major US hubs where this bag flew? Plus presumably an entire plane of iphones and that plane is certainly not a faraday cage.
Its crazy, but sometimes people have non-Apple devices. There's a decent chance none of the baggage handlers had an Apple device on them when they were handling the bag, or they were only around the bag so briefly it was between the airtag's chirps.
There's a good bit of separation between the cabin and the cargo hold. I imagine it could be pretty difficult to get a read from a low power tag deep in a bag in a pile of other luggage with several other big metal plates between.
That was a case where Lufthansa was confused about the difference between (volatile) Li-ion rechargeable batteries and the (benign) Lithium single-use coin cells in the AirTags. They retracted their stance on them after a day or so. It was a fire hazard thing, not a "we don't want you tracking items" thing.
Lufthanasa, like other airlines, was pissed that customers were routinely catching their employees claiming their luggage was "lost" when it was sometimes even sitting a few dozen feet from the person who was claiming the luggage was lost, so they made up some obvious nonsense about them being hazardous.
Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got confused"? It wouldn't have been against regs even if ti was a lithium ion battery because it's so tiny. What do you think they do about the millions of electric toothbrushes and shavers people travel with that have much larger lithium ion batteries?
They retracted it because it ended up causing a Striesand Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how airlines do a very brisk business selling "lost" luggage.
> Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got confused"?
Having dealt with battery regulations with airlines, couriers and postal services many times, yes, yes I do. They routinely fuck it up, even claiming that AA Alkaline batteries are too dangerous to ship.
> They retracted it because it ended up causing a Striesand Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how airlines do a very brisk business selling "lost" luggage.
... and lots of cases of "lost" luggage being due to the fact that decades after implementing paper tags, neither airlines nor bag/trolley manufacturers have gotten their asses together and worked on a standardized way to reduce instances of tags simply getting ripped off during handling.
Like, it wouldn't even be that hard. Place a long, wide recess maybe 2mm deep along the entire trolley, where the tag can be stuck in and is guarded that way against conveyor belts or other bags ripping off the tag.
And maybe invent a system where you have to scan your boarding pass and the tag barcode to leave the baggage claim area to reduce the amount of cases where people have taken the wrong bag.
