I Hate the Macrumors Comments
Occasionally I check MacRumors for Apple news. I used to look a lot more often when iPhones were still exciting but now it is only an occasional visit performed out of curiosity. Today I went on there looking to see if they had an articles about the state of Apple AI.
I found instead an article about a new accessory for the AirTag, called TimeCapsule and made by Elevation Labs. It's basically a large enclosure that uses two AA batteries to power the AirTag rather than the usual CR2032 to provide it with 'a decade' of power'. I don't need this but I can see the utility.
I scrolled down to the comments. MacRumors comments have always been pretty bad but beneath this article I found the very worst stereotypes of online interaction; just negative noise, a list of sentences thrown onto the Internet by people to try and look clever and belittle when all they are really doing is revealing their ignorance, resulting in a carousel of meaningless and fruitless engagement. I'd like to give some examples of these comments and a bit of a commentary on each.
First comment.
Not with Energizer batteries. They leak and the warranty is garbage.
Straight away we dive into negativity, someone needing to snark and turn their nose up. It's not even about the product in the article, it's about the batteries in the promotional image. I'm willing to bet Energizers leak no more or less than any other known brand, plus the batteries in the image are Lithium, which the other comments were eager to argue are much more leak resistant.
Isn't the point of AirTags that they're small and easy to attach to keyrings and luggage? Why would you need an enormous case? I can only see a few uses where this is perhaps a good idea, one being vehicle tracking.
A pointless comment. Internet fluff. A waste of everyone's brain power. This was someone's unedited and un-reviewed stream of consciousness - this is useless and has no use cases, apart from these use cases I can think of. They typed the first thing that came into their head - this is useless - and then they thought of some uses. They started typing before they had taken the ten seconds necessary to think of some applications for this product. And then rather than discarding their comment, they posted it anyway!
Cool, but let's charge the next AirTag on an Apple Watch charger.
What about users that don't own an Apple Watch? I suppose a one off investment for the charger might be justifiable if you own a few AirTags but doesn't the Internet hivemind hate non-replaceable batteries? Isn't a coin cell better than a product that becomes disposable when the tiny lithium cell expires?
Or one could just change the regular battery once a year.
I'm struggling to understand how someone can miss the point this much. This product might be niche, sure, but it eliminates a point of failure for the AirTag and reduces the need for administration. For you it's easy to change the battery once a year, but perhaps it isn't for some people or in some applications. You could just change the battery once a year, but if you don't want to, this product offers a solution.
So they tested their product with those batteries for a decade first right?
Mind blown moment. This is very simple. If we know the power consumption of a device, and we also know the amount of stored energy in a device's power source, we can work out the battery life. Maths is amazing. Does this person think that any claim on a product's lifespan is bogus? Do they not realise that companies test how products and their component parts wear and degrade so they can get an estimate on longevity, for purposes of determining how many potential warranty claims they may have, how long before a user needs a replacement, and the product's worth? Walk through IKEA and you'll see visual demonstrations of how they stress test their furniture, such as the chair cross section with pretend moulded ass being pushed into and lifted from its seat over and over, thousands of times an hour. We don't sit in a chair a thousand times an hour, but we might do over the course of a year. With the information this provides us on how the materials wear we can estimate a lifespan.
Then we get the humourous responses.
I'm waiting for a larger enclosure so my AirTag can be powered by a car battery.
And then the people who know better than the designers.
I'd have chosen 6 AAA cells as they're only 10mm in diameter, or you could use 12 CR2032s which would give you as much power as one AA and last five years. This could be done in a slim form factor.
Genius! Better email the guys at Elevation Labs and let them know. I'm sure that no one considered this at the design phase. It's not like they design and sell various other AirTag accessories, or that extra parts might add extra cost and points of failure, or that additional batteries might be difficult to insert and make the user experience worse. They probably just didn't think of it, contact them and let the know. You might geta job.
Others comments are all variations on these themes and the response comments arguing the opposite (yes, like I am here). Every MacRumors article ends up like this and still I'm surprised that people don't realise that just because a product isn't for them, it doesn't mean the product is worthless. It means - shock - the product isn't for them. Move along and don't buy it.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony that I'm ranting about people ranting.