(gentle playful music)
- Where is it?
I can feel the phone vibrating.
All right.
Finally, finally,
finally, Apple has officially announced AirTags.
It's this little puck right here
and it's just like a tile tracker for finding your stuff,
but with a few Apple specific differences, because Apple.
If you have an iPhone like this purple iPhone 12 right here,
look, it's a purple iPhone,
the AirTags slot right into the Apple ecosystem.
And having played around with this
for just a couple of hours, I gotta tell you,
this is a very Appley Apple gadget, here's why.
(upbeat music)
So the idea behind AirTags is simple enough.
This little thing here has Bluetooth low energy
and a U1 ultra wideband chip,
and it can ring when it's lost.
So your iPhone, when you're looking
around your house or apartment or wherever,
it can point a little arrow at it when you're near to it
and then you can make it beep to try and find it.
It uses Apple's Find My network, which means
that any iPhone will be able to locate this thing
but only you can actually see its location
because all that information is end-to-end encrypted,
not even Apple can see it.
Plus Apple has done some other things
to help prevent unwanted tracking,
which we're gonna get into in just a little bit.
Now, as far as the hardware design goes,
I think it's pretty good.
It's very small, which I like
but there's no hole here to attach a lanyard
or put it on a key chain or whatever.
To do that, you have to buy another accessory.
So that's one very Appley thing about this Apple gadget.
Now Apple sells one here, there's like 29 bucks
or you can get it in leather for 39 bucks
and there's a key chain
or you can get an Hermès one for a lot,
Hermès stuff just cost a lot of money.
But look, there's already third-party accessories
for as little as 13 bucks and I'm sure
even cheaper ones are gonna be coming really soon
but still, just put a hole on it, like right there.
Anyway, the AirTag itself is 29 bucks for one
or you can get a four-pack for 99 bucks.
But one really interesting thing
is the batteries are user-replaceable, they're CR2032.
Apple says that they're gonna last about a year,
but when they conk out, you can just replace it yourself.
That is different from some of the other trackers
that are out there
that have their batteries built in and non-replaceable.
User replaceable batteries,
on an Apple product in 2021, who to thank?
So those are the basics, but how does it work?
Well, it works just like you would expect it to work.
You pair it to your iPhone over Bluetooth
just like you do with AirPods.
You hold it next to your iPhone
and a little window pops up and then you can tap it
and the thing pairs and associates with your account
and then you can give it a name and you're off to the races.
The AirTag just appears inside your Find My app
with all the other devices
and when you wanna find it, you tap on it, tap the button
and you look around for it and there it is.
It just works, bing, bang, boom, very Appley.
(bright upbeat music)
Okay, so first use case, let's say
that you've lost this thing somewhere inside your apartment.
You can, first of all, have this thing
make a little beat by hitting a button.
(AirTag beeps)
You can go find it that way.
A really interesting part of this
is the speaker is actually the plastic dome,
that's what vibrates to make the noise.
But say that doesn't work,
if your iPhone supports ultra wideband,
you can use the Find feature
and it'll pop up a little arrow on the screen
and you can use that to follow it around.
And when you get close to it, your phone actually starts
to vibrate a little bit
to let you know you're getting closer.
It's just right there, it's really neat.
Now one really Appley part
of this entire ecosystem is the Find My network.
It is nearly a billion devices that support it.
And any one of them can locate one of these AirTags,
but only you can see its actual location
because it's all end-to-end encrypted.
So we're gonna try a little experiment.
Vjeran is gonna take one of these things out
and he's gonna hide it somewhere in the city,
but he's not gonna take his iPhone
or his Apple watch with him,
so it won't get the location from that one.
And then we're just gonna go out
and see if somebody else's iPhone somewhere in the city
has located this thing and I'm gonna see if I can find it.
So, let's try that.
Did you catch the thing I did, the awesome thing?
- Oh cool.
(bright music)
- Here we go.
- Okay, I am on my way to hide Dieter's little AirTag.
There's one thing that Dieter doesn't know
and that is that I have, I have gaff tape.
So I think I'm just gonna tape the AirTag to something
that he cannot easily access, and let's see how it goes.
- Well, friends the good buddy, Vjeran,
is somewhere in this city with an AirTag on 'em
and nobody with an iPhone has seen it.
- All right, I think I found
a good little spot right up there somewhere.
We'll see if we can get there.
- I don't where Vjeran is.
- I think that it'll work. (sighs)
- So I got a notification a minute ago
that the tag was located.
So I'm walking over to where it was located.
I can't see it now.
- [Vjeran] Okay, see that person right over there.
That's definitely Dieter
and he's walking the wrong direction
and he's definitely vlogging.
Yeah, I don't think he can find me.
- My AirTag and Vjeran was spotted
by the Fine My network eight minutes ago
somewhere near this address.
And I'm hoping that means I'm gonna see him real soon
'cause I miss him, miss him a lot.
- Getting kind of bored here
and all I can think about is food and coffee and deadlines,
and now we're outside of the video
that you're watching right now
in like couple of hours, it's gonna be a long night,
and I still don't have my phone or my watch.
Oh. (beep)
- I see him, there he is.
- [Vjeran] Hi.
(both laugh)
Thank you.
- Have you been here the whole time?
- [Vjeran] Yeah, I definitely saw you walk over there
and take a look.
- Yes, I walked up that way, came back.
I thought maybe because it requires 14.5 to work
and only 14.5 iPhones would see it,
so I was terrified of that.
- [Vjeran] And actually still haven't found the thing.
- Oh.
- [Vjeran] So you gotta go find the thing.
- Am I, so it's not on you in person.
- [Vjeran] No, it's not on me.
- Okay, searching for a signal,
trying moving to a different location.
12, nine, to my left.
- All right, I'm gonna come clean.
Should I come clean?
- Yeah. - All right.
I knew you were gonna look for it in the ground.
So I brought-
- You put it on the tree high up.
- I brought my gaff tape. (chuckles)
- Oh my god, are you kidding me?
Where is it?
- It's, come over here.
- You jerk.
- Come on, you can get up there.
- Okay let's talk privacy
which is another very Appley thing to talk about.
It always builds extra privacy features into its gadgets.
First, Apple is frequently cycling the Bluetooth identifier
on these little tokens so that they're hard
to attract my Bluetooth beacons or Packers or whatever.
But the really interesting thing it does is it keeps tabs
on whether or not an AirTag
has been separated from its owner.
So here's one way that it works.
If the system detects the AirTag happens
to be following along with a location of an iPhone user
that isn't the owner of the iPhone,
that iPhone will pop up an alert
that says AirTag found, moving with you.
You can tap that alert
to see the serial number of the AirTag
and it gives you the option to disable the AirTag
which is just twisting a little thing in the back here
to remove the battery, bang it's disabled.
Apple also suggests that you could contact law enforcement
and law enforcement could work with Apple
if it has the appropriate warrant,
but since Apple can't see the location,
of any of these AirTags itself, it's all encrypted.
The main thing that it can do is check the serial number
and see who it's registered to
because every AirTag has to be registered to an Apple user.
Now, if you're an Android user,
none of this iPhone specific AirTag found moving
with you alert stuff is gonna work.
But if the AirTag has been separated from its owner
and then it starts moving, suddenly, it will start beeping.
So you're not completely out of luck
with these privacy and safety features.
All in all, I think this privacy
and safety stuff is a really thoughtful system
and that kind of applies to AirTags in general.
They're small, they work with Apple's ecosystem
and they have a lot of complexity in how they work,
but all that gets boiled down into something
that's hopefully really simple to use.
Really the only non-Appley thing here is the fact
that the battery is user replaceable,
but the rest, let's go through it.
Kind of expensive?
Appley, and knowing that you might need
to buy accessories to make it work well, Appley.
Privacy-focused, Appley.
Really only works well with Apple devices, Appley.
Nice design overall, Appley.
Gives itself more features than third-party accessories
like Tile aren't gonna be able to access, very Appley.
And that's AirTags.
It's a very nice Appley Apple thing
for Apple users in Apple's ecosystem, Apple.
Hey, everybody, thanks so much for watching.
Let me know, do you like AirTags?
You think you might want a different solution
or do you just not care about tracking stuff at all?
Let me know down in the comments
and if you're looking for another video,
we just did one about class and how important it is
to all communication everywhere right now.
So check that out.