 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. There are 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 got to tell you, this is a very Apple-y Apple gadget. Here's why. So the idea behind AirTags is simple enough. This little thing here has Bluetooth low energy and a U1 ultra wide band chip, and it can ring when it's lost. So your iPhone, when you're looking around your house or apartment or whatever, 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 Findvine 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 going to 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 keychain or whatever. To do that, you have to buy another accessory. So that's one very Apple-y 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 keychain, or you can get an Hermes one for a lot. Hermes stuff just costs 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 going to 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 going to 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'd thunk? 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 of the other devices, and when you want to 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 Apple-y. 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 beep by hitting a button. 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. 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 Apple-y 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 going to try a little experiment. Viren is going to take one of these things out, and he's going to hide it somewhere in the city. But he's not going to take his iPhone or his Apple Watch with him, so it won't get the location from that one. And then we're just going to go out and see if somebody else's iPhone somewhere in the city has located this thing, and I'm going to see if I can find it. So you know, let's try that. Did you catch the thing I did? The awesome thing? No, no, just... Oh, cool. Yeah. 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 going to tape the AirTag to something that he cannot easily access. Let's see how it goes. Well friends, my good buddy Viren is somewhere in this city with an AirTag on him, 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 know where Viren is. I think that'll work. So I got a notification a minute ago that the tag was located, so I'm walking over to where it was located. Can't see it now. Okay, see that person right over there? That's definitely Dieter, and he's walking in the wrong direction, and he's definitely vlogging. Yeah, I don't think he could find me. My AirTag and Viren was spotted by the Find My network eight minutes ago somewhere near this address. And I'm hoping that means I'm gonna see him real soon, because I miss him. I miss him a lot. Getting kind of bored here, and all I can think about is food and coffee and deadlines. And now I have to edit the video that you're watching right now in like a couple of hours. It's gonna be a long night, and I still don't have my phone or my watch. Oh f***. I see him. There he is. Hi! Yes! Thank you! Have you been here the whole time? Yeah, I definitely saw you walk over there and take a left. I walked out that way, came back. I thought maybe because it requires 14.5 to work that only 14.5 iPhones would see it, so I was terrified of that. Actually you still haven't found the thing. Oh, okay. So you gotta go find the thing. So it's not on your person? No, it's not on me. Okay, searching for signal, but I'm moving to a different location. 12, 9, to my left? Alright, I'm gonna come clean. Should I come clean? Yeah. Alright, I knew you were gonna look for it in the ground, so I brought my gaff tape. Oh my god. Are you kidding me? Where is it? It's, it's, it's, come over here. You jerk. Come on. You can get up there. Okay, let's talk privacy, which is another very Apple-y 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 track by Bluetooth beacons or hackers 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 that an 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, you know, 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, you know, if it has the appropriate warrant. But since Apple can't see the location of any of these AirTags itself, that'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 going to 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-Apple-y thing here is the fact that the batteries use a replaceable but the rest, let's go through it. Kind of expensive? Apple-y. And knowing that you might need to buy accessories to make it work well? Apple-y. Privacy focused? Apple-y. Really only works well with Apple devices? Apple-y. Nice design overall? Apple-y. Gives itself more features than third-party accessories like Tile are gonna be able to access? Very Apple-y. And that's AirTags. It's a very nice Apple-y Apple thing for Apple users and 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.