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AirTags on Bikes 🚴‍♂️
- Thread starter scsskid
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He, and DCRainmaker, are my 'goto' people for honest reviews on bicycle and tech related stuff. Mostly bike stuff, but both have careers in IT too. I mean, if you are in to bikes, and riding bicycles, and/or need another expensive hobby...
"Bike" is actually one of the preset names when setting up the Air Tag, so Apple must figure there is a use case there.
DCRainmaker is OK, but for years he was a total Garmin fanboi and in complete denial about Garmin's horrible software quality and incompetant QA for it, where just about every new firmware release had regressions for prior fixes and critical flaws went unfixed for excessive periods. He would post comments as if he thought complaints were the consequence of user error. He was wrong. Finally he published a rant against Garmin about it, but by that point I lost confidence in his expertise and stopped reading his blog. It took Garmin two full years to make the Edge 1030 reasonably stable and he just didn't get it.
I just ordered four. Two for the rotties, and two for the bikes. If it works out I'll get another four for the rest of the bikes.
They are quite a high impact area, as a mountain biker my bar ends take a battering, so would prefer to keep AirTags somewhere more protected.
I've had plenty of problems with Garmin devices over the years. He's been more valued by this old biker because of the stuff he says about the non-Garmin stuff. I've had problems with Edge units in the past, and I have to say they are much better for the past 10-ish years. I had an early Edge 5xx version that would crash repeatedly at the same spot on a group ride. The exact same spot, it would crash. We did the ride 'backwards', and it STILL crashed. I reported it to Garmin, and in about a month, they released an update, and it didn't crash at the same spot. I was surprised, and happy because when it crashed, it crashed hard. I had no data from before the crash.
I also had the 'don't turn off your Edge' error, and Garmin fixed that within days. (If I turned off my edge, it wiped the memory, no more ride)
Garmin deserves a lot of scorn, and grill marks on their butts (the website ransomware attack!), but I've been generally happy with their devices.
The LBS dropped all their Wahoo accessories. 'Reliability' was their reason. No sensors, no 'computers'. They stopped carrying the Kickr, and only picked it back up after the latest version. Wahoo isn't the best either, necessarily.
I had a huge number of ANT+ sensors, and they just worked with Garmin. Call me biased, but why replace what was working fine.
But I get it.
It's damned hard to find unbiased opinions on almost literally anything. DC isn't completely unbiased (I think) but I have had so much smoke blown up my orifices, I have developed a rather jaundiced view of reviews in general. Amazon is FILLED with BS reviews. OMG!
I feel I have a good grip on reality, and have avoided many products that turned out to be worse than buying a Pet Rock.
You still have to be an 'educated consumer'. With physicians, reviewers, sales people, friends, relatives, whatever...
*shrug*
He's better than most, IMO. Find a better person, let me know. GPLama is funny, and rips those that need to be ripped. I value his opinion, but in the end, it's ME that determines if I think I believe what ANYONE says.