Hello and welcome back to Week in Review, friends! I have spent the previous few weeks relaxing and making sure my 2022 hot takes are as fiery as possible, or at the very least as foresighted as possible. This week, we are talking about the itty bitty AirTag, which could be one of Apple’s biggest scandals of the decade thus far. You may subscribe to receive this in your inbox every Saturday morning by visiting the newsletter page, and you can follow me on Twitter at @lucasmtny.
The key thing is that Apple’s AirTags are a highly useful device that performs almost exactly as described. That, unfortunately, is the issue. There has been a lot of backlash recently about how Apple released them, and how, while they are wonderful for keeping track of your keys, they can also used to stalk someone. This is not just a hypothetical problem; it is already happening.
It’s not a particularly uncommon circumstance in which technology may be exploited for both good and terrible purposes — just consider the decades-long debate over encryption — but I have a hunch Apple will lose, and it will be more embarrassing than any other failure in recent memory. Over the last few years, Apple has focused a lot of its wearable product marketing on how their gadgets work in edge use cases. The last several iterations of Apple Watch have centered on health tracking features that might help users identify unusual diseases or assist them in a life-threatening emergency.
Individual accounts of users who have found the Apple Watch to be a life-saving instrument have highlighted in TV advertising. There is potential for some of the same good with AirTags, but there is also a lot more risk. We will surely see examples of AirTags being utilized in bad ways in the coming year, which, when combined, will serve as the antithesis of one of these Apple Watch advertisements. It could end up becoming a product defined by its glaring flaws.
Apple has made its own post-launch efforts to tighten up how AirTags that do not belong to a specific user can discovered, but these notifications have proven to be problematic and have frequently alerted consumers far too late. When you consider that Apple has treated Android integration as an afterthought rather than an essential cooperation in order to release a gadget like this, Apple’s incompetence becomes even more apparent.
I seriously doubt Apple will be able to design their way out of this mess. Whatever they ship on iOS to fix problems, Android’s split ecosystem means that precautions will not reach a large number of users who could targeted. It is difficult to understand how Apple can justify continuing to offer AirTags in a fledgling product category with such high PR risk. It is a one-of-a-kind Apple blunder in that the corporation delivered exactly what it promised but failed to examine the full spectrum of that promise’s direct repercussions.
