AirTags
Perhaps the most anticipated product that didn’t materialize in 2020 were Apple’s much-rumoured AirTags item tracking tags. With code for the devices found in the early iOS 13 betas in the spring of 2019, followed by the new U1 chip in Apple’s fall 2019 iPhone 11 lineup, most oddsmakers would have placed strong bets on the AirTags materializing early last year, but of course that didn’t happen, and when three fall 2020 Apple events came and went with nary a mention of the tags, it became even more of a mystery as to what Apple was up to.
Although Apple continues to develop underlying code to support the item tracking tags, it now appears to have gotten far broader in scope, with plans to embrace third-party item trackers as part of a new Find My Network that Apple announced at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. In fact, all the code and set up screens that we’ve seen in recent iOS 14.x updates are much more generic, with no specific references at all to Apple’s own AirTags.
Our guess? Apple has AirTags ready to go, but with competitors like Tile already rattling the cages of antitrust authorities, Apple has decided it’s not worth poking the bear on this one by releasing its own product before it’s invited third parties to play along.