"The AirTag may be the most well-planned and executed location beacon ever made." -- Alan Truly
From ScreenRant's "Why Apple Might Have Already Won 2021 With AirTag" posted Friday:
Apple's newest category of products is an iPhone accessory called AirTag and this tiny location beacon may end up having one of the biggest impacts of the year. With nearly one billion Apple devices worldwide capable of accessing the Find My network, these top-quality, yet inexpensive key, luggage, and bag trackers seem likely to dominate the U.S. market in 2021, and should eventually prove just as popular worldwide.
The AirTag may be the most well-planned and executed location beacon ever made. Part of that is due to the huge number of the iPhone 11, iPhone 12, and Apple Watch Series 6 owners that comprise the Find My network. With over an eighth of the world’s population carrying devices that can anonymously ping an AirTag and send an encrypted transmission of its location back to the owner, the ease and accuracy of finding an item almost anywhere in the world is astounding.
My take: These little things are going to be a big hit.
I received all kinds of inquiries from my friends wanting to use the AirTags for tracking things “far” beyond what Apple designed the tags to track. Hunters are wanting to track their dogs. Below is a response I just sent to several hunters along with the article by Alan Truly. Is my response spot-on? Correct me if I need correcting. I am attempting to answer many folk’s questions on how to use Air Tags beyond keys, glasses & luggage.
“…. It’s UWB, not Bluetooth. Got that corrected now. Unlike the GPS where you input the coordinates and go there, the ping comes from other Apple & smartphone devices nearby (600 feet or 2 football fields) on what you are tracking and sends that pinged location “encrypted” back to your tracking device (iPhone). Lost dog? Yes, one could track a lost dog but will know within two football fields where the dog is located. Once you get to that location geographically, then the Air Tag tracker is ‘precision’ to take you to the dog. Lost dog in the city? Yes! Lost hunting dog in woods? Not so much unless many hunters are carrying smartphones on them.”
For tracking a child I thought I read that Apple recommends an Apple Watch. Might work for the dog as well. Get one with a cellular plan so it can work in the woods with no other iPhones around.
https://youtu.be/fEePCsp-GaQ
For hunting dogs, maybe there will be an iPhone 12 Mini or SE also attached to the dog (iPhone AirFetch ™ ) that will provide a beacon and Find My Network connection that extends the local search range for the AirTag’s UWB for a pack of dogs.
This similarly could be used for any manner of groups of things IF used for actual tracking – rideshare eBikes fleets, select parcel shipping without barcode scanning, even tracking football, soccer and basketball player movement in real time. The mind boggles.
Oh so wrong!!! Based on the interest and on the inquiries about the AirTags that I am getting from people, Apple definitely will sell tens of millions if not a 100 million plus this year alone.
Just guessing now, but if Apple is limiting sales to 16 it is expecting tremendous demand, and that makes Kirk’s full year estimate very doable.
Then there is this thought: if Tile fails after the Air Tag launch, would it be because Apple denied them access to the Apple Store, or was it because the Air Tag was so much more attractive to iPhone users?
I think there is a bit of truth to the former (anti-trust violation?) but that will be overwhelmed by the dramatically better performance and feature set of the Air Tag.
Tile currently has a monopoly on tags, but that is soon to be broken by Air Tags that will go on to become a monopoly.
Simply put, Tile can’t compete because it simply has no control over the many variations of Android hardware, or the Android OS itself. In other words, Tile doesn’t control the stack, whereas Apple does. Controlling the stack leads to better functionality and that is not a violation of anti-trust laws.
That wasn’t even a first year sales estimate. It was actually meant to say that eventually maybe a third of a billion users (and I know there’s more than that by now) would EVENTUALLY get at least one AirTag.
So let’s take a third of THAT number to come closer to what a first year’s sales target might be:
333,333,333 / 3 = 111,111,111 x $29 = $3,222,222,219
Not too shabby, eh?
Subsequently, multiplicity of purchase will surely be driven by the discovery of utility from that first AirTag usage and take at least a few years to pan out to extended multiples of that first year.
Followed by Asian Lunar New Year’s celebrations.
Found.
How long will it take before these show up in police procedural Tv shows? Not to mention romantic comedies. I mean iPhones are now the device of choice now.
“Hey Siri, find my other sock”
And this is just the 1.0 product. Imagine where Apple, and 3rd party developers may take this.
AirTags may at last (after decades of visionary speculation) give us a true IoT device.
Shop for champagne.
Ohmygod yes (remembering my experience with lost luggage from several years ago on a trip to England), and wearing the same clothes until I bought another set.
How many will be sewn into children’s winter coats?
Gregg T, I believe that in the tech world that 7 or 8 years is a life time. By the end of that period the current Air Tags will become relics and more unique, new and innovative ones will be available that will be compacted with exponentially higher technology and precision range. Think of the Air Pods with how each new generation is perfected and designed more compactly. The same will happen with Air Tags. So, this is an accessory item that will bring in a significant amount of incremental revenue for Apple for many years to come.
AKA: endless upgrades.
Well, I believe that number above will be reached the first year of release, because many folk are buying the packets of 4.
Tom Rush on the subject:
I want to test this out. I want to mail one to a relative across the country and see how well it tracks. That would be awesome to see it pop up from time to time till it arrives at the destination.
Alas…think different.
It’s obviously meant to be the most simple iteration of a tracking device. No more, no less.
Then a secondary robust marketplace grows from all the notions of “iterations of attachment” all the way up to the inclusion of “spaces” built into worthy things to incorporate an AirTag.
Eventually an everyday ecosystem, if you will.
(Sound familiar?)
And we’re not yet talking about the resale and reuse market for used AirTags that will surely develop within a few years. Wonder if Samsung’s Smart Tags will suffer the same price erosion / depreciation as their smartphones, tablets and smartwatches??
AirTags will be a nice incremental driver for WHA revenue and gross margins.