Apple AirTags Review: Flawless tracking
Are the Apple AirTags a good investment for your valuables? Let’s find out.
Apple AirTags aim to solve the tracking problems that we face with our daily-use objects. The all-new Apple product is a minimalistic looking tracker that takes advantage of millions of iPhones that are in the hands of users combined with the amazing Find My interface to help you track your products. AirTag has a simple concept. Attach it to anything you care about, and when you forget it somewhere, just open your Find My app and track it.
However, are AirTags the right way to do it or someone else has done it better? Let’s find out.
Apple AirTag Review: Design
First of all coming to the size, it is big but not as big as they look in the images. If you have ever seen a women's winter coat, you might have seen those big buttons on there. That’s the rough size of the AirTag.
Visually the AirTag is classically Apple. Minimalist and elegant. The top is a white surface along with a chrome undercarriage with the famous Apple logo along with some small tests around the edges of the chrome undercarriage. You can get up to four characters with a limited selection of symbols and emojis engraved on the white smooth surface to personalize your AirTag.
The AirTags are IP67 certified, so a little water won’t damage it, but any dust, or keeping the AirTag with your car keys for example will scuff up the pristine white back and the chrome undercarriage quite easily. There is also a user-replaceable battery, which sounds great as you will be able to use the AirTag for a long time. The AirTag uses a CR2032 battery which the company claims lasts around a year and is easily replaceable.
However, the biggest design flaw of the AirTag is the absence of a keyring hole on the body. The round shiny circular design cannot be attached to your keys or bag without any keyring. I liked the idea of keeping the Airtag on my car keys, but due to the absence of any place to mount it, you will need to buy an accessory to attach it to your keyring. Thankfully, Apple has a wide selection of keyrings and bag tags to choose from. You can fit your AirTag to one of those accessories to get the most use out of your AirTag.
Apple Airtag Review: Setup
As you would expect from any other Apple accessory, the setup process is super simple. You just need to remove the plastic tab which keeps the battery disconnected and you will hear a small sound and the Airtag setup screen will appear on the iPhone nearest to the AirTag. From there you need to select its name, an emoji to represent it in Find My app’s map and voila, it's done.
You just need to keep in mind that you need an iPhone or iPad running iOS 14.5 or iPad OS 14.5 or later. Older iOS versions can help as beacons to help you find your Airtag, but cannot be used to set up the device. Also, if you want to use their most advertised feature, the short-range precision finding feature, you will need an iPhone 11 series or iPhone 12 series phone.
Apple Airtag Review: Tracking
Let's say you forgot your bag on a busy metro train. If you had an AirTag inside the bag, the AirTag would send distress signals using Bluetooth LE to nearby devices and any device on the company’s Find My network, that is iPhones, iPads, iPods touch and MacBooks will pick up the signal and update the location data on the company’s servers. This way you can track its location without a dedicated GPS chipset on the AirTag. Thanks to the insane number of Apple products sold worldwide, you can track your lost backpack anywhere in the world until someone finds it and removes the battery off the AirTag.
Once you have reached the location, like the building where the AirTag is located, you don’t need to search every inch of every floor the building has. If you have the U1 enabled iPhones i.e. the iPhone 11 and iPhone 12 series devices, you can use something the company calls short-range precision finding. Combined with beeper sounds from the AirTag and the directions given by the iPhone, you will be able to pinpoint the device.
Apple Airtag Review: Verdict
The AirTag costs Rs 3,190 for one and Rs 10,900 for a pack of four. With that being said, the price is quite close to its competitors making it a reasonable choice for anyone using the Apple EcoSystem. With the short-range precision tracking and long-range tracking based on Apple’s Find My network, which is really good thanks to the insane number of compatible devices out there to act as a beacon, AirTag offers one of the best tracking experiences out there.