Apple AirTag
Find lost things – with some caveats
Apple’s tech means you can find just about anything you have attached the AirTag to
£29 (4-pack £99) FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES U1 chip for Precision Finding (U1 chip needed in iPhone for Precision Finding), Near-Field Communication, Bluetooth, Siri support, IP67 rated, CR2032 replaceable battery
Keeping track of your stuff can be tricky at the best of times. Are your keys in your jacket? Have you left them at a café? What about your iPhone? Thankfully, that last one is easy to fix thanks to Find My – the app and iCloud service that makes it easy to track Apple devices. But, seriously, where are your keys?
Enter AirTag, an Apple-branded tracker that comprises Bluetooth, an ultra-wideband U1 chip and Near-Field Communication (NFC) tech and Find My to help you track it down and/or identify it.
The item-tracking concept isn’t new. Tile, Chipolo and Samsung’s SmartThings all offer Bluetooth trackers and have done so for years (Chipolo’s forthcoming One Spot will work on Find My too). However, Apple’s belated entry into the sector could be a game changer – thanks to its ability to the create intersection points between hardware, software and services “where the magic happens”, according to Tim Cook. The question is: how magic is the AirTag, really?
The AirTag costs £29 (a 4-pack costs £99) and is slightly bigger than a two-pence piece and around three times as thick, with a chrome front and glossy white back. The disc springs into life the second you remove the tag that activates the supplied CR2032 battery. On an iPhone updated with iOS 14.5, the AirTag appears on-screen so you can pair it with your device, with a menu offering a range of preset names – keys, backpack, wallet, etc – as well as a Custom Name option. The AirTag then links itself to your Apple ID, appearing under the new Items tab in the Find My app on iPhone, iPad and macOS (but not in iCloud – yet).
In Find My, you can play a sound using the AirTag’s built-in speaker or if you own an iPhone 11 or iPhone 12 with a built-in U1 chip, use that chip’s precision-finding capabilities to help find exactly where an item is – the Find My screen shows direction arrows and distance and, as you get closer, your phone gives haptic feedback, while also showing the distance to the AirTag in metres or feet. Once it’s found an item, Find My says ‘It’s Here’.
On older iPhones and other Apple devices without a U1 chip, you’ll just be given an idea of an AirTag’s likely location. You can, however, still tap the Sound button. Curiously though the macOS version of Find My doesn’t give this option. And the chirruping sound the AirTag makes isn’t particularly loud, so you’ll need to be in a fairly quiet place.
You can also put an AirTag into Lost Mode. This enables you to assign it a phone number, so that anyone who finds it and taps it with an NFC-enabled device can find out who it belongs to and return the item.
Testing, testing
To test the AirTag, we embarked on an AirTag treasure hunt in our five-storey HQ – with the device out of range (and few other iPhone users in the building due to COVID restrictions), Find My told us to move to a different location. After traversing all five floors of the building with no signal, we got a ‘Connected. Signal is weak. Try moving to a different location’ message before finally picking up a signal strong enough for the more precise tracking on an iPhone 12 Pro to work. Sure enough, we managed to pinpoint the exact location, confirming with the use of the Sound button to make the AirTag pipe up.
So we found the AirTag, but it took a while. Partly because the building wasn’t overly occupied with Apple device users; partly because while the AirTag contains an accelerometer (to tell if it’s moving from place to place), it doesn’t contain an altimeter so we couldn’t tell what floor it was on.
The biggest issue, though, is privacy. Apple says it’s gone to great lengths to ensure that AirTags are secure (they’re linked to your Apple ID and use encryption), and you are warned if there’s an AirTag nearby that doesn’t belong to you – which should stop a stalker from slipping one into your bag. However, the on-screen warning only works if you’re on iOS 14.5 and doesn’t work on
Android. Apple says an undetected AirTag will also play a sound “over time” – although it doesn’t specify how long. Brenda Stolyar of Mashable discovered that it took up to three days for an undetected AirTag to pipe up… Maybe take Apple’s privacy assertions with a grain of salt then. Or if you do discover one that doesn’t belong to you, pop out the battery.
Finally, there are the accessories, and AirTag’s build quality. While Tile and others include a slot or hole in their trackers to make them easy to attach to any keyring, Apple does not – instead, it sells AirTag key fobs and loops, which range from the affordable (£29) to the silly (Hermes Luggage Tag, £399). There’s also a growing number of third-party fobs and loops from the likes of Belkin and Nomad. You might also want to invest in a protective film for your AirTag. One of ours has only been in place for a few days, but its chrome and plastic body is already starting to get scuffed. Parents might also want to make sure that the AirTag is kept away from small children; its relatively small size and easy-toopen battery compartment are potential hazards. It’s also worth noting that unless you stow AirTags deliberately out of sight, they’re pretty easily removed, while the shiny finish, Apple logo and fashion-forward loops and fobs are positively attention-seeking.
Rob Mead-Green