Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
I need to applaud the efficiency and moxie of the Zurich / Swiss police service.
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.
> I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was. Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
That's awesome. I'm glad that trackers have reached a price point, reliability and form factors that I can easily put one in everything I care about. I even have card ones in my wallet, my steam deck / e-reader case, etc.
Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.
Funny story: I actually forgot my backpack in the train at Zurich HB and it went to Basel and back again to Zurich HB, where I was able to get from the train.
All the while I was nervously looking at Find My, seeing it travel and just hoping it wouldn’t be stolen.
Same story in Bulgaria. A backpack with an iPhone and an iPad was stolen from a car. Had to go to the police department to file a written complaint. Weeks after that the devices were still visible in FindMy but police could not identify and catch the thieves.
So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)
I wish I had this in the early 2000s. The theft of my carry-on bags flying with Alitalia turned out to be an organized crime ring of flight attendants and ground crew. They didn’t get caught until 2013, the whole rotten lot. Never flown with Alitalia since then.
> The new AirTag is designed with the environment in mind, with 85 percent recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and can be easily recycled.
I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
Unfortunately the anti-stalking features have made Airtag mostly useless for theft prevention. You have less than an hour to retrieve your item before the tag alerts the thief they are being tracked. I've seen it trigger as quickly as 30 minutes.
Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.
You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.
They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.
Stupid form factor, though. Need to buy extra accessories to be able to actually mount it to anything, but I guess that's the Apple way. Why not have a hole to put a rope or anything through?
Apple of late is a mystery. Their software and hardware product quality is wildly inconsistent and, yet, with the most simplest of hardware like AirTags and AirPods, they're like magic. iPhones, I could hardly care less about. These new airtags? Insta buy!
It sounds like the external dimensions are going to be exactly the same or nearly so. I'm hoping the battery compartment is also identical so that third-party mounting and extended battery packs continue to work.
I recently picked up a few of these extended battery packs and it would be nice to eventually upgrade the AirTag if the extended range turns out to be meaningful. They're pretty neat, you remove the battery cover completely and only insert the half of the AirTag with the electronics and radio.
my parents live in Russia and my grandma has alzheimer's, so as a present "for her" I bought an airtag - so in case my mom loses grandma in a crowd she can be found.
Little did I know, GPS jammers around the city make my grandma appear 50km away.
AirTag itself doesn't have GPS, of course. It depends on the devices that communicate with the AirTag having precise location. IF you have a phone in Russia, are your maps apps off by 50km these days?
The AirTag does not have a GPS receiver. When anyone's iPhone discovers the tag, it sends their device's location to Apple servers with "by the way, this AirTag is in range." If cellular location is inaccurate then good luck.
What airtags need is a theft mode, where anyone carrying the airtag is not alerted, but the location can be retrieved by an approved local authority after being voluntarily surrendered by the owner.
I wish they made airtags in different form factors.
I've gotten into photography lately. I'd love to slip an airtag into more places - ideally within the housing of my camera bodies themselves. But, there's not really any room to put an airtag on or in a camera given the current airtag form factor.
You can get camera cages with secret compartments for airtags. And lens caps which take an airtag. But they take up a lot of space, and end up adding a lot of bulk to the camera itself. I wish Apple opened airtags up to 3rd party manufacturers who could buy the (tiny) circuit board directly, so they could hide it in their products better.
The better solution is the route that Insta360 took with the Go Ultra. The camera has embedded "Find My" technology. No Airtag or hiding things required, the entire camera is the tag.
All we need to do is get more camera companies to follow suit.
So they made it impossible to remove speaker, destroying its usability as a theft tracking device. One could add an airtag with a removed speaker on a bike/scooter/car and then localize it in case of theft. With the new airtag any thief will be quickly notified they are tracked.
Ironically, one of the reason Google's offerings are (were?) worse is because Google prioritized privacy and required pings from multiple phones to count a tracker as seen.
I bought my first a years ago after some awful customer service experiences with Google re: Pixel phones. While iOS is not without its faults, most of the "just works" marketing has thus far turned out to be true in my experience. Their software feature set isn't on the cutting edge for a lot of things (my iPhone 13 couldn't even display the weather on the lock screen when I first got it), but they do generally get there eventually.
I have about 4 or 5 Airtags and haven't actually had any practical use for them, but just having them on my keys and expensive camera backpack is a nice peace of mind. My sister however, was able to track down her suitcase which the airline supposedly "forgot" to load and got compensation for it.
That's great, but could they do something about what plays on the speaker? It's all pretty in that Apple sort of way, but the fact that its volume goes up and down makes it harder to find. Y'know, exactly the one thing you're trying to do with it?
For anyone outside the U.S where most likely people around you will have Android devices and not iPhones, you are better off ordering trackers that are compatible with Google Find My Device
They're cheaper and allows third parties, plus the network is stronger.
I'm curious whether the improved range is actually going to make the product worse for my particular use case, which is being alerted when I've left my bag somewhere (this has happened to me at least 5 times over the years). My understanding is that the item left behind notifications are triggered when your phone loses contact with the AirTag, so increased range can potentially take me from being notified as I step off the train to being notified as I leave the station and the train has departed.
Metromile insurance — now Lemonade — had a fantastic feature going to way back in 2015 AFAIR, that allowed you to track your car to bill you per mile. As a bonus they gave you location tracking history. This feature helped me nail down my olden beater which the thief stole not knowing what was in the ODB.
The car was used to commit a crime and the location tracking history was used by the detective at the local PD to nail a professional ring with additional evidence targeting certain cars. The car was totaled but I got insurance money back.
Metromile's app now only shows you your car's live location — that too only after several years of the acquisition — but no location history, which is sad. I _think_ law enforcement can actually ask them with warrants and they would have to give that data if they have it. Don't say you delete the data because of privacy, because we all know its not true: let me store the data in my phone. (Google already does this with its location history tool in maps) Pretty please?
To Metromile: You are already using a location stack from apple/google's Location Provider with a permission modal in the app. Its like nothing in LoC with a local storage and an opt in/out setting.
I'm kind of the opposite use case: I own four AirTags, keep them in different bags and suitcases, and I've literally never needed them.
I don't lose any luggage or bags, so most of the time they just sit there quietly burning those CR2032s. For me they've ended up feeling more like they are preventing me from anxiety than doing something that actually changes my life day to day...
[+] [-] helloguillecl|1 month ago|reply
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
But also the thief and his accomplice.
[+] [-] teoruiz|1 month ago|reply
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
[+] [-] trollbridge|1 month ago|reply
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] VerifiedReports|1 month ago|reply
The anti-stalking measures with AirTags, while we all recognize why they're in place, also greatly reduce their value as anti-theft devices. I've gouged the speakers out of a few and hidden them in my vehicles, but if Apple makes that impossible to do with the new generation... no sale.
[+] [-] varispeed|1 month ago|reply
So refreshing to hear. Here in the UK the police would be annoyed by your call and at best would give you crime ref number (usually after mentioning that you will file a complaint if they don't) to take up with your insurance provider.
[+] [-] ghaff|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|1 month ago|reply
Also, most of these have usb-c / wireless charging, so I don't have to mess with random cell batteries every 6 months.
[+] [-] lm2s|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] pkulak|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] kavalg|1 month ago|reply
So, airtags/findmy are good, but then it is up to the police to get their job done. I guess Switzerland and Bulgaria are different :)
[+] [-] hbarka|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] dostick|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] khana|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] FAFOAlex|1 month ago|reply
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[+] [-] logicalfails|1 month ago|reply
I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
[+] [-] pnw|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] FigurativeVoid|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|1 month ago|reply
You can buy 4 third-party trackers for the price of 1 official one.
They do lack UWB, though there are other great form factors such as cards, and cool features such as wireless charging or usb-c charging, which imo is nicer than swapping batteries every few months.
[+] [-] matsemann|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] prodigycorp|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] qingcharles|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] tshaddox|1 month ago|reply
I recently picked up a few of these extended battery packs and it would be nice to eventually upgrade the AirTag if the extended range turns out to be meaningful. They're pretty neat, you remove the battery cover completely and only insert the half of the AirTag with the electronics and radio.
https://www.elevationlab.com/products/timecapsule
[+] [-] swe_dima|1 month ago|reply
Little did I know, GPS jammers around the city make my grandma appear 50km away.
Not Apple's fault of course.
[+] [-] mig39|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] opengrass|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] etchalon|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] josephg|1 month ago|reply
I've gotten into photography lately. I'd love to slip an airtag into more places - ideally within the housing of my camera bodies themselves. But, there's not really any room to put an airtag on or in a camera given the current airtag form factor.
You can get camera cages with secret compartments for airtags. And lens caps which take an airtag. But they take up a lot of space, and end up adding a lot of bulk to the camera itself. I wish Apple opened airtags up to 3rd party manufacturers who could buy the (tiny) circuit board directly, so they could hide it in their products better.
[+] [-] ShakataGaNai|1 month ago|reply
All we need to do is get more camera companies to follow suit.
[+] [-] vostrocity|1 month ago|reply
It still takes some space but quite clever
[+] [-] adastra22|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] storus|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] port3000|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ubercore|1 month ago|reply
I think there are other options too
[+] [-] 4fterd4rk|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] minton|1 month ago|reply
Interesting to call out that it’s not designed for pets. I know several people with AirTags on their pet collars.
[+] [-] rconti|1 month ago|reply
I'm glad this appears to have been a focal point of the design.
[+] [-] subscribed|1 month ago|reply
Time for me to buy my first iPhone then.
Sincerely, f** Google. I've been android user since I had to abandon Symbian, and their impotence in this one thing is staggering.
[+] [-] jml7c5|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] melonpan7|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|1 month ago|reply
That's great, but could they do something about what plays on the speaker? It's all pretty in that Apple sort of way, but the fact that its volume goes up and down makes it harder to find. Y'know, exactly the one thing you're trying to do with it?
[+] [-] sebstefan|1 month ago|reply
They're cheaper and allows third parties, plus the network is stronger.
[+] [-] jon-wood|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ghm2199|1 month ago|reply
The car was used to commit a crime and the location tracking history was used by the detective at the local PD to nail a professional ring with additional evidence targeting certain cars. The car was totaled but I got insurance money back.
Metromile's app now only shows you your car's live location — that too only after several years of the acquisition — but no location history, which is sad. I _think_ law enforcement can actually ask them with warrants and they would have to give that data if they have it. Don't say you delete the data because of privacy, because we all know its not true: let me store the data in my phone. (Google already does this with its location history tool in maps) Pretty please?
To Metromile: You are already using a location stack from apple/google's Location Provider with a permission modal in the app. Its like nothing in LoC with a local storage and an opt in/out setting.
[+] [-] Lwrless|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] rafram|1 month ago|reply
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/01/apple-introduc...