Probably not as good a deal as Lowest ever price for these on Amazon but still a better discount.
AirTag. Keep track of your keys, wallet, luggage, backpack and more, all in the Find My app. Play a sound on the built-in speaker to help find your AirTag nearby. Or if it’s further away, get help from hundreds of millions of Apple devices in the Find My network to track it down. All anonymously, and encrypted for privacy.
MediaForm link
Costco restocked 1/7.
Sarcasm and the comments from that deal lol
Was so close to buying then I heard latest releases now allow deactivation from non-owners to stop stalking? Can anyone confirm this. I can understand the issue with stalking but defeats the anti-theft purpose I want to use it for.
yes but if the thief knows to deactivate it on their phone they probably would know to look for it and throw it away
The non-owner will only know of it’s presence if they can hear the AirTag chirp, or gives them an alert from either their iPhone or their Android phone if they have downloaded the “Tracker Detect” app from the Play Store.
Once located it can be opened and the battery taken out. By putting the AirTag in a hard to find location which muffles sound it will reduce the chances of it being deactivated in a stolen goods scenario.
By putting the AirTag in a hard to find location which muffles sound it will reduce the chances of it being deactivated in a stolen goods scenario.
Unless the person who put it there has trivially modified the tag in order for the speaker not to work.
Useful for bike owners, actual nightmare for people who have legitimate concerns for their safety.
I have a tag on my car keys. Apple doesn't let family accounts share AirTags. My wife constantly gets "this airtag may be following you" when using the keys. She was previously able to permanently disable the warning notifications but they are back now with no option to disable.
good idea..but also a crap idea smh
guess i need to wait for a gen 2 airtag…
This one you originally posted is back in stock now at a slightly lower price (+$9.90 shipping for me)
I have just updated post. Hopefully it’s $9.90 delivery for everyone
Are these good to be chucked in the kids school bags?
You would want to put it in a small secure pocket of the bag or secure the tag to the bag so it doesn’t easily fall out or off. Do this and they will work well.
I got a 4-pack a while ago, the utility of these are a bit limited in its current form because they keep focusing on strengthening anti-stalking protections (which simultaneously means it's easy for thieves to find and deactivate or remove the tag) rather than add features such as tag sharing to enable more than one person to find or control the tag.
You can only add it to a single account, and no one else can see the tag location, which isn't great for say putting it on a dog, or car keys that others might be using. Since there's no sharing, if someone else has the pet or item with the tag attached, it'll just end up nagging them that a tag has been following them around, and eventually start beeping.
TLDR: these are only really useful for helping locate personal items that you may have misplaced, or for a good samaritan to return that item in case you lose it. It's not suitable for items you share with others, or for preventing theft unless the thief is really dumb.
unless the thief is really dumb
If you deal with criminals regularly, you know that odds on that are pretty good.
But yeah, annoying that you can't set up your tags for the risks you actually want to mitigate.
Do the similar products like Tile Mate have the same issue?
Would you know the difference between this and a Tile?
Airtags have a huge lost item network because there are lots of iPhones out there to help find them. With Tile you need to rely on someone actually having the Tile app installed so the lost item network isn't as large as Apple's. Tile also makes you pay for the leave behind feature whereas Airtags have that for free. The Samsung find network relies mainly on Samsung phones but to work a user has to opt into the find network (although the phone bugs the user incessantly to opt in). There are lots of Samsung phones out there too but not as many and the phone needs to have Smart Things on it so newer phones only. Smattags aren't sold at retail shops in Australia so have to be ordered online. Airtags have 1 year battery life with ultra wide band (UWB) for convenient directional searching when you're close to one. Smarttag+ has UWB directional find but rubbish battery life of about 5 months. Smarttag normal has 12 month battery life. The UWB directional finding is a bit of a gimmick because when you're that close you can just make the device chirp and find it by listening. The Smarttag normal also has a signal power indicator so you can home in on it by signal power too. Smarttag doesn't have the unknown device following you warning like Apple does. With Samsung you need to initiate a scan to locate unknown Smarttags so with Samsung it's easier to catch thieves. With Airtags if they're away from you for a random time between 8-24 hours (if I recall) then they start chirping to alert people nearby. Airtag speakers can be removed but it's fiddly (see Youtube videos). With Smarttags they show your located history whereas Airtags don't. Smarttags also have a programmable button that can be used to make your phone ring if you've lost it or to trigger smart home routines.
Tile was also sold to a company called Life360 not long after AirTags came out. Life360 purports to be a service that helps families keep track of each other's location (similar to Find My Friends, but not limited to iOS), but have become quite notorious for selling user location data to data brokerages and advertisers.
I would not trust using a Tile product, period.
Care to provide the article about this? Been using tile for my family and now concern about this
@BigLeviathan: Here's an article from around the time they announced the Tile acquisition:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820381/tile-life360-loc…
There's actually a followup from earlier this year about poor security practices at the parent company but I don't know how much of that is applicable to Tile:
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2022/02/17/family-safety-app-t…
Wow. I'm so glad I never bought these. I've been waiting for a good price but Apple seems to have crippled their use.
They really need to create a jewellery line. Would make a great Valentine's gift.
From what I can see these are designed to locate lost items rather than recover stolen items. Surely if something has been stolen then people just need to remove the tag from it and drop the tag in a bin. From the perspective of “lost items” I have a card, with my name, and phone number, that I keep in my wallet in case I lose my bag. I left it at a cafe, once, and a waiter rang me to say it had been left behind. I don’t know these tags but what would be good is if you got a ping if the tag is a certain distance from your phone to know you’ve lost stuff. That would also work for pick pockets if both your phone, and the tag, started pinging. You could, also, pin one to the clothing of your kid.
It does let you know if you've left the tag behind, but I'm not certain of the distance or interval it checks for this.
I've gotten "item left behind" notifications when I've left one in the car parked in someone else's driveway while I'm in their house. But I've also gotten it when one is left at work at least 10 min after I've started driving, which isn't really quick enough if I'd left it behind accidentally.
Yeah, this thing needs to go ping when you are more than a couple of feet. In my case my phone is, usually, in my bag because I have the Apple Watch. I, ping, the phone from my watch if I can’t find my bag. With my bag I make sure the clips are clicked and, if overseas, I usually have a cable twist across the zip ends. It takes a little more time to open the zip but it stops people being able to open the zip without me knowing. The one time my wallet was taken was in Barcelona and it was dumped, quickly, because I had no money in it. A local kid highlighted what had happened to me and showed me where my wallet was. I hadn’t done my cable twist thing for that day. I didn’t even notice.
Could you show me a picture of this zip tie technique on your bag? Just wanted to see how you secure it while travelling
Thanks
Apple needs to enable family sharing for these.
A friend's bag got stolen and the thieves started tapping his bank cards to make purchases. Luckily his mobile phone wasn't stolen so he was able to deactivate the cards. Traumatised I went overboard with trackers and I carry around 6 of them lol (several in bags, keys, and decoys). If triggered I'll sound like a novelty Christmas card. The Airtags are small and easy to hide. Be careful not to let young children get at them because the CR2032 button batteries are apparently easy to get at by kids. I've now loaded my bank cards into my phone so they're locked behind biometric security. Left my bank cards at home so if my wallet is stolen the thieves can't steal money.
Someone said the battery fell out while in their pocket. Not secure at all and adds to the reasons why BigW and OW have stopped stocking/selling them.
In my experience using the Airtags the battery is quite securely held in place. The silver top needs to be twisted to release the battery and it's pretty firm. Children can twist off the cover but for regular carrying around the battery cover isn't going to twist off easily. Apple didn't include a hole so that they can sell accessories for the Airtag. I just purchased a third party leather holder for a few dollars.
This is right, Apple has stopped supplying to the major retailers as the AirTags do not pass the button cell battery compliance which kickz in 22nd of June!
That is knowledge I didn’t have before I came here. Just now read about it on the ACCC site. Thanks for the heads up.
Airtag 2 here we come… Airtag Air?
$132.99 < $143.95 ? better deal than Amazon one.
what am I missing …