Someone mailed an AirTag to themselves to see if they could track its route

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AirTag Setup
AirTag Setup (Image credit: Joe Keller / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Apple's AirTag promises to help you find your stuff, so a YouTuber decided to test that out.
  • The person mailed a tag to themselves and followed its route on their Mac.

Apple's AirTag item tracker is now on sale and people are already putting them through their paces. But just how accurate is the tracking capability of the little plastic pucks? That's something Dutch YouTuber AirtagAlex wanted to find out, so they mailed an AirTag to themselves and watched it work its way through the Dutch mail service.

Turns out, with the exception of a couple of errant reports, AirTag tracking actually works. Who knew?

Check out the video and see for yourself. It's in English, so no worries there.

Capture it's location every 2 minutes using the automator on the imac I am trying to figure out the route of a letter by regular mail.

Using iPhones as a sort of mesh network, AirTag should be more accurate than competing products from the likes of Tile and this test suggests that is indeed the case. I'd love to know what caused the AirTag to get confused once or twice, but that could simply be early Find My teething troubles. We'll know more when AirtagAlex posts the AirTag to another country, as he promises to do.

Picked yourself up a new AirTag? Be sure to check out our collection of the best accessories for AirTags, too.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.