The AirTag is also far from perfect. I wish they were louder — they
are very quiet compared with Tiles — so playing sound wasn’t very
helpful for finding them. I also did not love that for most purposes,
the AirTag requires buying a separate accessory, like a key ring, to
hold the tracker.In contrast, the Tile has a hole punched into its corner to attach to
a key ring or zipper head. (The $29 price tag of the AirTag is
eclipsed by Apple’s $35 leather key ring.)
As I read an Apple AirTag review, a New York Times article, I encountered the sentences above.
I wonder what "that" in boldface works as in the sentence.
If "that" in boldface is a demonstrative pronoun as usual, it should represent the immediately preceding sentence, or the deficiency of the device's being too quiet.
But the fact seems to me a bit odd that "I also did not love that for most purposes" is immediately followed by "the AirTag requires buying a separate accessory, like a key ring, to hold the tracker," which can stand alone as a complete sentence, with no conjunction but only a comma.
Please explain the function here of "that" in question.
Best Answer
That in the sentence is not a demonstrative pronoun. It's a subordinating conjunction, and functions in exactly the same way as
Lexico has a number of examples of that as conjunction.