Does Apple really expect me to change a tiny battery once a year like a common peasant?
Apparently not if you are willing to strap a plastic tumor to your belongings. Elevation Lab thinks the peak of innovation is taking a design that fits in a coin pocket and inflating it until it looks like a prototype for a ruggedized garage door opener. You are trading elegance for the privilege of never having to interact with your property again until the heat death of the universe or until the Bluetooth standard becomes obsolete.
Who is this actually for besides doomsday preppers with short term memory loss?
It is for the person who wants to track a trailer in the middle of the woods for a decade without ever visiting it. If you are hiding something for ten years without checking on it, you probably have bigger problems than battery life. Most people will lose the item, the trailer, or their own sanity long before that battery finally gives up the ghost. It is a solution searching for a problem that involves a lot of unnecessary bulk.
Is sixteen dollars a good deal for this plastic brick?
It is sixteen dollars for the honor of making your AirTag look like it is wearing a puffer jacket from a bargain bin. You get to pay money to make a small device large. It is a masterclass in anti-design. You are essentially buying a coffin for a tracker that will likely be technologically irrelevant by the time the first battery bar even drops. It is cheap because even the manufacturers know that most people prefer a slim profile over a decade of theoretical standby time.
The technical reality is that this case uses large CR2 batteries to achieve its marathon lifespan. While the case claims to be waterproof and rugged, it ignores the fact that the Apple Find My network relies on the density of iPhones in the wild. If you leave this in a remote location for ten years, there is a high probability no one with an iPhone will ever walk past it to ping the location anyway. You are effectively carrying around a very durable piece of plastic that just happens to have full batteries. Innovation has truly hit a wall when we are just taping bigger batteries to things and calling it a product.
The product description highlights its ruggedness, but the real challenge is justifying the size. AirTags were designed to be discrete. This case makes the AirTag as discrete as a brick thrown through a window. If you really need to track something for a decade without touching it, perhaps you should consider why you own that thing in the first place.
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