AirTags
Other than the new iPhones, Apple’s most-rumoured and most-anticipated product is its AirTags Bluetooth location tracking tags, which we’ve been hearing about for well over a year now.
In fact, the reports began before Apple even unveiled iOS 13 in the spring of 2019, and when code was found in the early iOS 13 betas, it seemed to strongly suggest that Apple’s AirTags were going to be arriving sooner rather than later, so when 2019 ended with nary a sign of them, it really left a lot of us scratching our collective heads, especially after Apple debuted its new U1 Ultra-wideband chip in its iPhone 11 lineup last year, which was seemingly made for precise location tracking of devices like AirTags, but didn’t really get put to any good use beyond a slight improvement to locating other iPhones for AirDrop.
Recent reports have suggested that AirTags are in production now, however — to the point where we almost expected Apple to unveil them at last month’s Apple Watch event, but it would sort of make sense that it’s saving that reveal to go alongside the iPhone 12 since that’s the device most people will be using to actually locate the AirTags.
As to why it’s taken this long? Only Apple knows for sure, but we suspect that the company may have run into a few engineering challenges, and wasn’t about to repeat the AirPower debacle of pre-announcing something before it was 100% certain it could pull it off.