2 things to note: 1) My understanding is in lost mode, airtags ping every 15 minutes to conserve battery. So there’s a limit to how quick it can be found, regardless of how populated the area is. 2) My understanding is that one common tactic when a car is stolen, is that the thief may park the stolen car somewhere for a day or two, to make sure the car isn’t “hot”. And in those cases, an airtag could possibly help. Also, good video :)
My car is in for service. I put an airtag in the car. Can confirm that you can actually get an updated location (via other people’s iPhones) without it being in lost mode and it works great!
Good point, I feel like putting it in lost mode may help the thief as if they have an iPhone it should tell them there is a list airtag around (per my understanding)
I would say that if someone stole your car and you hid your airtag well enough, they would have no idea where to look for it! Also as they are driving down the road, they will pass someone who had an iphone so depending on the range of other iphones connecting to it, just as long as you are in a populated area then it would work great as an anti theft device!
Hi, I’m currently 85 miles away from my car and using the find my app it shows the exact location of my car. Obviously using my airtag which is in the car. So in my case the Apple eco system appears to be working and that’s without putting the airtag in lost mode.
I live in a highly populated area and with plenty for iPhones, and it works great. I get updates on the location fed from other phones that pass it by all the time. It's awesome! highly recommend
The downside of this is that your Air Tag will alert the Thiefs iPhone that there is an AirTag in the car with them. As its not the Thiefs AirTag his phone would get a ping saying something along the lines of "Non-user owned AirTag is in your close proximity" etc. It's a security feature to help people know if they are being stalked unsuspectingly.
@@alw1915 that’s not a downside. As long as you hide the air tag. They shouldn’t be in your car. Maybe that alert will make them ditch the car. That’s a plus.
Guys. I got a 4 pack of air tags for Christmas, had no idea what to do with them. I put one in my back pack, one in my wife’s purse , one in my truck hidden under the center console carpet (you know , just in case anyone ever stole my truck 😅) I figured why not? Fast fwd 2 months …. Woke up one morning my truck was gone. Tracked this guy who stole it!! Only down side was I was about 10 min behind him , hauling ass around town to all the “pings” where locations were last seen, finally…. After 4 hours he was not moving for about 10 min . Found him at his house!! My truck was parked behind his home in a dirt alley way ! had already filed a police report prior, called police and got my truck back! To me , it’s SO worth having in your vehicle. hide it good. It worked! I have had this truck for 11 years. 2004 LLY duramax. My baby, was home.
Having 1 hidden in your car is an excellent idea! If some1 steals your car it will be driving past many cars on the road who have iPhones and can give an updated location
Especially for me since I live in a city where 30 cars are stolen everyday. Thankfully mine hasn't been stolen. Had a cat converter stolen from my truck months ago. But oh well.
@@Jjjjjjj750 Really? Didn't know this "feature" existed yet. That's good to know. I need to do more research. But I desperately need to install alarm, kill switch, and cat bars to protect my car. Where I live, it's not about a matter of if. But when. :(
@@Jjjjjjj750 I know AirTags notifie someone if they seem to be followed. Probably the system understood that the person in your car was being stalked. Did you activate the “lost mode” for the AirTag?
I May be missing something, but it seems like if someone stole your car, you may not find it within minutes, but as they are driving away I’m sure they can bump into someone at the stoplight with an iPhone and it can give an idea of what direction the car is going. I just got my truck stolen last week, and I’m looking for options that could give me/police leads of where to go look. It sounds like a good option even if it is not 100% a GPS tracker
For tracking stolen property other-than a car, an AirTag might help you find it or you could report it to police where there is almost no chance they will ever find it.
That’s police for you. Useless at recovering stolen stuff. You’re better off retrieving your stolen goods yourself, but if that’s something you really want to do, your best bet is to bring a gun.
Pro-tip if you have CarPlay you can actually use Siri to find your car in a parking lot bc it remembers where you disconnected CarPlay. Just ask Siri “Where’s my car” and it’ll bring you to it. It’s not super accurate but its helped me a few times
You don't need car play for that. Google phones have been doing parking tracking for that last 5 years or so. Google phones use AI to detect when you're driving, and when you stop, they will pin your location on Google maps for when you stopped driving. That means you can drive a car 50 years old and still have park tracking.
I’ve got mixed feelings on using it for theft security if a thief gets notified they’re being tracked. They may choose to ditch the vehicle instead of risking looking for the AirTag and getting caught whilst they do. An MO of professional thieves is to scan the vehicle for GPS or Bluetooth signals first and then plan where they take the vehicle to to search it for ten mins. With traditional hardwired tracker units there’s a limited number of places to conceal them and can easily be found by the professional thief. But then again some vehicle fleets advertise that the vehicle is tracked with a sticker on the vehicle to deter the opportunist thief so alerting the thief of the AirTag may be no bad thing if it panics them into ditching it. And some thieves may decide not to carry iPhones so they don’t transmit the AirTags position, in which case they won’t get alerted of the AirTag unless there’s an app to detect AirTags that android users could use ? I’d rather have one (or two) strategically hidden than have none at all.
or, you could put several warning sticker on your car, saying "There are SEVERAL airtags in this car and they are all Well hidden, Good luck finding All of them in time."
Technology making it hard to be a car thief. Also, I love the term “professional thief.” If that’s not the most potent oxymoron, I don’t know what is. 🤣
I live in California (LA Country) I recently bought one just in case my car were to ever be stolen. Since I live in the city and I would say majority of people have iPhones ID say gives me a good chance of tracking down my car or even search in a general area. I sure wouldn’t 100% rely on it but I would say that if you live in a very populated area like Los Angeles your chances of locating your vehicle is increased greatly.
My issue with these videos is the lack of real-world testing. Someone wondering if these things work wants to know if they actually work rather than just speculating based on what Apple says.
Or if you are a mechanic, you know how to get your airtag inside of the car where someone trying to take the battery out of it wouldn’t know how to get to it. I have mine all the way inside the electrical system. Even if you have the location of it, you wouldn’t find it LOL
I thought that these apple tags were a gimmick, my wife a set of 4 as a gift. She put one in her purse one in our dog one in her office backpack and she uses another one in her luggage. We 'lost' our car once, tough we parked in a 3rd floor in the parking lot but it was in the 4th. We already toght that it was stolen it took us 20 minutes to think about using find my app and well we found our car. Also our golden retriever decided to take an adventure and escaped from the back yard something she has done a few times in the past. Instead of driving for a couple hours looking for her we just used the app.
Not sure I agree with your position that 10 minutes is a long time to find your hard. I’ve had several experiences where I spent more than an hour looking for my car. If I could find it in 10 minutes, I’d be super happy.
This might be the worst product review video I have ever seen. It contains outright wrong information and should be pulled or reshot. You DON'T have to put it into lost mode to track, that's just show a complete lack of understanding of how the product works. 5 minutes with one and I already knew more about it that this video says.
If that had been the case I wouldn't have said anything. But he's been posting product reviews for 7 years, and has over a half million followers - you expect more
Airtags have a anti stalking feature by sending alert to anyone who’s phone pings to the airtag and has been constantly following them, your airtag will also make noise after 3 days of no Bluetooth contact with your phone.
This comment needs to go up top! I do appreciate that the anti-stalking feature exists. Without it, this widely accessible technology would've enabled a whole lot of privacy issues for millions of people around the globe. However, I can imagine someone stealing my car actually dropping it after such alert, rather than taking the time to try finding it. So, I'd say that the anti-theft use case for the airtags still stands.
@@drinkin_park Agreed. Finally someone with some common sense. If you can’t outsmart/think a common criminal, you’ve got bigger problems IMO. A life of crime is WAY more work than an honest living. The only thing that makes them smarter is the fact that they generally don’t pay taxes nor vote in stupid politicians. 🤣 Smart criminals are not jacking cars to commit crimes. Smart criminals run large corporations or countries. And even they’re usually dumb enough to think they’ll never get caught/exposed.
@@iamColaboy Yeah, you might want to think about another anti-theft device or two if parking it for long periods. No different than if you park your car at the airport or at a friend’s place, alarm gets set off…it’ll keep going off until the battery dies or someone takes a bat to it. AirTags are meant for everyday use and to be “at hand.” As are car alarms. They can only do so much as the user is willing/able to do. Hence why the average person completely ignores a car alarm these days, unless it’s not stopping. Most of the time they are set off by the user or something environmental (loud car passing by). Criminals don’t tend to go around setting them off on purpose. That would make them a pretty bad criminal. The point of them has become moot, especially if the user is not around to be alerted by it. AirTags are actually great in that way. Many people have iPhones, making the network really large. But they are not a “set it and forget it” solution. Also have to forget about/be okay with the fact that we’re always being tracked. Everything has it’s pros/cons. 🤷🏻♀️
I was thinking of putting one in my elderly parent’s car as a precaution should they get lost (my mom has an iPhone). Do you think this would be useful or is there a better product I can insert in their vehicle should they lose their way or are in trouble? Thanks.
LoJack went out of business. This is exactly why I got air tags- to track my car Incase of theft. Watched a video where a guy was able to track his bike from Amsterdam to Germany, and also putting it in a package halfway around the world. He could find them no problem because so many people have iPhones . Watched another video comparing air tags- to Tile and the Samsung Android version ( forgot the name). Air tags- took 10 minutes to find his car, whereas the others took 40. I actually have an Android but am using the air tags-.
I don’t think an iPhone needs to be on 14.5 for a passerby to send the location of the airtag to the find my network. Yes 14.5 is required to use the airtag with the find my app and set it up. I have an airtag in my car and it’s also not necessary to put it in lost mode as it still will update the location when an iPhone comes in range and you can enable notifications when it’s not in lost mode but you have to enable notifications again after you get a notification. I park my car on the street in my neighborhood and it’s nice to know where my car is if I forget which street I park it on. I do have a garage but the garage is closed for several months for repairs so I mainly will use it for remembering where I parked. It updates really like every 5 to 10 min After midnight not as much.
I was actually going to use the air tag to track my truck when shipping my vehicle cross country. Now that I watched your video, it doesn't sound like air tag has the ability to do this kind of task. Most folks say the air tag is great, but only if it's near by and not somewhere far. If I'm wrong, can someone let me know.
I think you’re actually a little mistaken about how these work. You don’t need to be in lost mode for other iPhones to ping it. It will ping any iPhone in range no matter what. I have one in my car that I often have to park far away from my apartment and without putting it in lost mode I can see frequent updates for whenever an iPhone user walks by. So in your example, even if i took 10 minutes for someone to walk by your car, that would likely happen before you even thought to put it in lost mode.
If you lose your car in car parks like me everyday it’s a life saver. It remembers where I left it from when I walked away. It says 15 minutes ago or whatever but assuming my car didn’t drive away on its own it’s full proof.
But if the thief also has an iPhone, won't their iPhone inform them that some unknown AirTag is following them? Even if the speakers are removed, the thief will still know that the car has an AirTag, and will try to find and remove it, no?
I moved to San Antonio, TX, and my vehicle was just in an accident and will be repaired at a repair place and I wanted to attach my AirTag in the consul by via 3M 2 sided tape while it was away from me. I don't trust anybody here yet with the repair of my vehicle so, I'm just iffy on leaving my vehicle without them taking it to place other than the repair place. Is that a good idea?
6:15 it’ll help either way, because some people around the car at certain times maybe at stop signs stop lights or even driving by, will help ping the location
Only got one airtag for my keys. This morning I couldn't find my keys and used my find my app on my phone to find where they were with the sound feature. All i could hear was bleeping near by and followed it around the house, but without finding them and the bleeping staying with me . Only to realise my keys were in my pocket. D'oh!!! Lol.
Hey understand if you do this, make thing that sits on my youtube recommendations page for 4 days!!!!! im clicking not interested and thats probably going to ding you on the algorithm but honestly you deserve it, I dont need a 4 day recommendation for a 10 minute video that contains about 10 seconds of maybe useful content
Buying one tomorrow, I recently saw a post on FB that someone stole my neighbors car (I live in an apartment complex). So I’m putting a tag on my car lol.
Young or old I’ve lost my car in the parking lot cause I didn’t pay attention or came out a different door so helps me find my car. If your ADHD and miss place things often including your car this will help
My guess is the thief will definitely have one, so he gets the alert he’s carrying an unpaired tag with him so he finds it and gets rid of it, or the car.
I was wondering about that concept. I was thinking about putting one of these in the car to help you find where you parked. Say you went to Walmart and forgot what parking aisle you parked in (but know the rough area where), if it'd help find where you parked.
easy just make it as secondary means for tracking, there are gps signal jammer out there in the market just in case your primary gps tracker got block.
APPLE are a smart bunch of people ... Why haven't they built into this device, a Mechanism that makes the AIR TAG reveal the users. They should render the mechanism 'unusable' until you somehow identify yourself before attaching it to something. Perhaps an open panel where you have to 'retina scan' or 'finger print access' the AIR TAG before it starts working! This would be helpful if it is misused, for instance if an ex boyfriend tracks his former girlfriend and murders her .... It can trace the Tracker back to him. Hopefully these Tags keep a record of all the places it has tracked to.🇬🇧👍🏾
Because they are never going to reveal how much data on us they actually collect. You think for a second that they don’t know the users connecting to each device, even AirTags? Just because that info isn’t user-facing, doesn’t mean it’s not Apple-facing. It may not include actual names without further information/data/security clearances, but it most certainly would tell them/track the device’s serial no, etc. Pay close attention to what he’s saying in this video…the AirTag only works within Bluetooth range but can possibly find a location via other iPhones. That means that iPhones are always pinging GPS locations whether the users want them to or not, with or without consent/knowledge. (The consent is always in the fine-print of the software updates that no one ever reads.) Even if the device is off/dead. Yep, even the battery has “died.” This is nothing new. It’s always been a huge controversy with Apple, hence the term iHostage. It’s the price we pay to be so connected. It’s the worst kept “secret” that our location/identity isn’t always known one way or another. Hence why criminals use burner phones. People who track their exes to murder them are beyond stupid to use a tracking device to do so. (If it’s tracking her location, it’s also tracking his.) If he’s decided to murder her (which she probably has some idea about since he’s an ex for a reason since he’s probably made the threat many times already), he’s probably going to be successful regardless of the method he uses to track her down, if he’s going to the trouble of hiding a tracking device. Someone like this probably doesn’t give two shits about getting caught or doesn’t think they will get caught. That level of arrogance pretty much ensures they’ll get caught, unless they are some criminal mastermind or the area has a completely corrupt/inept police force. Nothing is going to stop it if he’s hell bent on doing it short of her getting to him first. He’s not going to care/think about “I might be getting tracked by Apple.” While perhaps a deterrent, someone determined enough will just find another way. People watch way too many true crime shows and clearly not enough time getting to know the people (and the friends/family) that they are dating. People who would use tracking devices to find and murder an ex probably come across as having other rather alarming issues from the start. Perhaps we should worry more about spotting/figuring that out with the person we’re sharing a bed with than what the smart people of Apple are or aren’t doing. 🙄
Well, mine it works 10miles away from where I am, I see your points it’s like flippin a coin but is an accesible option, great vid and good points of view.
You don’t need to put an AirTag in the lost mode for AirTag to connect to Find My Network. Which ever iOS devices are nearby AirTag will broadcast to those devices.
To be honest bro if your car is stock Your insurance will give you the money but for somebody like me who has highly modified their vehicle it’s a completely different situation
Nice video Andrew. The AirTag is definitely a game changer for me as I always lose things lol. And I got the esr car charger a month ago because of your recommendation, I have to say it’s really great.
I really don’t know what was going on in this video 99% of the time, I’ve had an airtag stashed away in my car for months now, I’ve never had to put it in lost mode to actively track it and it’s come in handy finding my car in parking lots (turns out we were two rows off from where I actually parked), also I’ve had slightly more frequent updating then the usual 10+ minutes, I’ve been getting updates within 6-8 minutes
Andrew, if someone steals my car with AirTag, and they have an iPhone and drive home, won't they receive a message notifying them an AirTag is following them and they would then disable it?
My car is parked 1 mile away and I can see the AirTag in my car updating every 4-10minutes...and I live in a country where the iPhone market share is only 18.11%
I'm buying then to track my cars. All are older "classics" that are very easy to steal. You can jump then just by popping the hood and jumping the starters already before hoods were unlocked from inside the car so these will fit the bill just fine. Also for my dog. Apple doesn't want it to track pets and people, sure but they have poor reasons why not to. The NFC chip can be put into lost mode by anyone if found. Yes my dog's also chipped but better to have than have not.
I suggest you put multiple airtags in each of your valuable vehicles. you could put several warning sticker on your car, saying "There are SEVERAL airtags in this car and they are all Well hidden, Good luck finding All of them in time."
If you take out the speaker, and assuming the thief has an iPhone, do they get a notification that an AirTag is tracking them if they take your vehicle?
@@thulanihlatshwayo78 A few hours. It was a feature to stop stalkers. Though since high end cars have trackers anyway it’s seems superfluous to put an AirTag on it.
Yep got one for each of my cars to track primarily if stolen. Fingers crossed I never need it. You raise some good points though. I still think as you mentioned that it’s not gonna hurt hey, and it may just help.
Best open them up and remove the speaker ( speaker magnet actually ) which takes a few minutes, otherwise the AirTag can start beeping after a few days, so could then be easily found and removed.
Once you've put it in 'lost mode' will it stay that way even if you get back in your car? I live on a busy city centre road and always have to park in random places that I can't remember...so would want it constantly in that mode
This is still valuable because Tile requires the tile app. My husbands car was stolen and we had a tile in it. we had no luck because Tile is less popular than apple in general. So much of the population has apple.
@@Mouryum Hmm, I ever did follow up on that. Not sure what is better the fact that someone can follow you for three days? Or that I now know I could put one in my truck/car and maybe have three days to find it. Makes a cheap LoJack I guess.
A vent phone holder is stupid because in the winter time you are cooking your phone and all new cellular phones has a temperature limit. Just think how hot your battery in your phone gets than add the heat from your car to it. Now if you run your air conditioner you will cool off the phone and that would be better. Now I would look at a dash mount or glass one.
It's important to remember that airtags battery only lasts one year. After that new circle size battery most common in watches. Where as an phone may only last 2 to 3 days before needing to be recharged. At that point if your not confident in the airtag. Spend roughly 200- 300 and buy a proper car tracker
wait so... it doesnt work like a phone would in find my? cause when I lost my phone i was able to sign into find my and saw that I let it at my friends house. Airtags wont show you where they are like that unless youre close?
is there way to record the movement of the airtag? ie, when it make moves, then it keeps record. rather than just show the current location, and doesn't show any history of previous locations.
