your attention please
i'd like to introduce you to apple's airtag it's their latest foray into the
world of bluetooth trackers and it's something we've been waiting
quite a while for now the idea is it helps you find things
you've lost whether it's nearby or far away and to put to the
test i'm going to be leaving this backpack full of precious merch
on this train and we're going to see how easy it is to get back in a couple of
hours
now before the panic sets in what you're going to want to do is put the air tag
in lost mode you can do that by just opening up the find my app and then tapping on the object and clicking
enable lost mode now what this lets you do is
put your phone number with the air tag so that if somebody finds it they can connect to the air
tech with nfc be taken to a web page with the number and hopefully reconnect you
with your last object curious if that's what's going to happen to us today
all right so in the meantime uh what we're going to do is we're going to find
a set of keys that i had a colleague hide somewhere in the city and one of the
great things with air tags and to find my app is that you can get directions
straight to the place using apple maps
now while we're on the way to this air tag i should probably explain how air
tags work now they don't have gps built into them that would take too much electricity
so they use bluetooth low energy and with bluetooth low energy
what an air tag is doing is it's looking for another phone to connect to
to then send out its location the big leverage point for
apple is that they use their find my network which is basically
every iphone that has it turned on which is upwards of a billion users now
and what that means is that the air tag can connect with an encrypted connection
to any iphone that's nearby and tell you where it is
so you're bound to get a more accurate reading more quickly with air tags than
you would with any of the competitors
in 250 meters the destination is on your left
all right are we
all right so we've arrived at where it says the keys are
and now i have to go and find them
more precisely so let's see how this
goes
okay so it says that
uh the keys are here with me so
what i'm gonna have to use is ultra wide band to get a precise location of
where it is just by hitting find nearby it's going to try and connect
oh six and a half meters away try and connect to the air tag
and then point me in the direction of where it is now ultra wide band only
works if you have an iphone 11 or 12. otherwise you can make it make a
sound so it's around here and i should put the
sound on
is it in the ground in the garden
is it on a
there it is now when you get really close to the object your phone starts to vibrate like it's
in a game of hot and cold and here it is in a bike
how clever it could have been anywhere in the city
well now that i have an air tag we can now talk about the design
of it it's a curious little thing that really evokes
the design of the old ipod you know with
the glossy white plastic on the front and the shiny glossy chrome
on the back it's also just as easily scratched and scuffed as those old
devices were now annoyingly it doesn't have any sort
of hole or anything on it so that you can attach a key ring or some sort of
lanyard so if you buy one of these things you have
to buy a holder if you want to attach it to a key or a
backpack and this key ring from apple costs 35 on top of
the already 30 dollars you spent on the air tech now i'm sure amazon will
come to the rescue with really cheap options but i hope they're
good quality
so what about when it comes to tracking people which is
probably something you don't want apple has thought about that in the design of
the air tags they have a couple of protections which
are interesting for one an air tag that's separated from its owner will
start chiming whenever it's moved after three days so
if you don't even have an iphone you'll probably know about it then
but if you do have an iphone and you're running iOS 14.5
or higher you will get a notification saying that an air tag that's not yours
is nearby we tested this with my cameraman but
he didn't get the notification until he arrived
at home so it's not that instantaneous
in fact today i've had an air tag on me all day that isn't mine
and i'm still none the wiser
all right so it's been a couple hours since we left
the backpack on the train and so i'm curious uh
where it is at the moment ah
it's at the sky train station well actually the candle line station
nearby here marine drive which incidentally is the train station where
i left the backpack on the train now i have been monitoring it through the
day and it did make a couple of lengths up and down the line
but it made it back to its home this
train is for ybr
airport it says it's here but it could be
do you think there's an office below or something
we're shipping near it according to the last update which was eight minutes ago
i can't get a signal i can't get a u1 signal
and i can't get it to play sound
with the ultra wideband chip the range isn't that great i've seen maybe
10 meters max which is about 30 feet 100
feet 200 feet make things a lot easier but i'm not getting a signal
according to the map it's on the tracks
but i don't see anything
disappointed disappointed
please
okay so it's the next day and i thought i'd have to end the piece
you know thinking that the bag is gone and lost forever and that we really
pushed what the air tag can do but actually
i checked the app this morning and it's
moved it's in the maintenance building for the train line so
there's hope i forwarded your message on
to uh my manager and i'm sure he'll be in contact with you when skytrain lost
property gets your backpack you can pick it up from them at
stadium okay well i appreciate all the help
now jonathan you said you called when you were coming here
because it could still be here but it could still be in quarantine right now
why don't you give me a description and i can go back so it's it's just a uh blue and red
backpack it should have a little thing dangling on the front of it
thanks
it must be not out of quarantine jonathan okay
so here's our number okay give us a call
because it should be out tomorrow morning i'm hoping right as you said you
tracked it right here yeah i can't it's literal it's right i
it's right here i could probably beep it i could make it beep really really i
just want to see if i can hear it
wonderful very
yeah they're so handy eh we got it back
never thought that would happen
all right so i guess what we showed is that the lost and found system does in fact work which is
nice to know but if i didn't have this i'd have to use
translink's broken web form or call them and try and describe what the bag looks
like and hope it just turns up but this just made things so
much easier and then i have it back for me initially
i thought the air tags would just be ideally suited for my wallet because i
do lose it in the house on occasion but i don't know after this there's something
to be said about attaching one to your bag or to another
object you value should you ever really lose it it really goes to
show just how handy that find my network is
thanks for tracking this Mac Address and make sure to like and subscribe
now i'm sure you're curious what's in this bag so let's take a look we got
an adorable little CPU pillow from the LTT Store as well
as a water bottle still in its box a fashion
wireless keyboard and a bunch of t-shirts that are
too big where's the mock turtleneck