Apple is a very serious company full of very serious people, and with a trillion-dollar valuation (and the rest), that’s no surprise.
Still, we rarely get a glimpse into things behind the scenes that humanize the company a little, and that’s exactly what AirTag users got this week.
Apple rolls out its firmware updates for AirTags, its portable trackers, in phases. This avoids the strain of every single one of them requesting the download at the same time, which could have a knock-on effect for other Apple services if the strain gets too much.
That’s the plan, anyway, but it appears this time around things didn’t quite go to plan as all AirTags got the latest firmware at the same time. And, as spotted by the X (formerly Twitter) account iSWUpdates, it’s the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.
Looks like Apple accidentally set the deployment dates for the 2.0.73 AirTag firmware to “m/d/24” instead of “m/d/2024” that has used in previous versions and which the AirTag update system uses as date format. As a result, AirTags think the deployment dates are in the year 24… pic.twitter.com/dH5s0FrgTyMarch 21, 2024
“Looks like Apple accidentally set the deployment dates for the 2.0.73 AirTag firmware to “m/d/24” instead of “m/d/2024″ that has used in previous versions and which the AirTag update system uses as date format,” the account explained.
“As a result, AirTags think the deployment dates are in the year 24 and they just skip to the 100% rollout batch.”
In layman’s terms, Apple rolled out its update to the year 24, not 2024, and as someone still putting 2023 on my correspondence, that’s something I can appreciate.
Does it matter?
In all honesty, no – your AirTags aren’t likely to take up much of your attention whether they’re updating or not, and your update may have been a little slower as a result of the sheer volume of requests. If nothing else, it’s a reminder there are humans working at Apple and we all make mistakes.
As for which new features are included in the firmware, there’s a good chance it’s a series of compatibility fixes, but we won’t know until Apple updates its AirTags support page for the new version, 2.0.73.