AirTags are designed to track your stuff, but how good is tracking if you lose something outside your home?

Dutch YouTuber AirTagAlex decided to give Apple's tracker a try, and to see how good AirTag's location tracking really is, he mailed himself an AirTag.

AirTagAlex set up a script that pings AirTag's location every two minutes and takes a time-stamped screenshot to verify its location. It was then placed in a Dutch mailbox several hundred feet from his home and left there.

The AirTag tracking proved to actually work, but not without some problems; AirTag Alex was able to see the progress of the tracking. He could see when the tracker was picked up from the mailbox and traveled 120 km before returning to his house.

The difficulty is that location tracking is not always completely up-to-date; AirTagAlex noted that shortly after the tracker first started moving, it was clocked at one intersection, then suddenly pinged at a mail sorting station 12 minutes away.

Of course, it is worth bearing in mind that AirTag is not a GPS tracker. That is, it does not always receive satellite signals to determine its exact location. Instead, Air Tags uses an iPhone running iOS 14.5, and the device sends a ping to Air Tags when it is within communication range.

Given the number of people who own iPhones and Apple's dedication to providing updates to a wide range of devices, this means that Air Tag has the ability to be much more accurate than the best keyfinders from competitors, although Tiles may be great, The app must be installed. If no one installs it, your tracker may be completely useless.

In any case, aside from a few hiccups, AirTagAlex's little experiment shows that AirTag tracking is quite useful. And what you put in the mail can make quite a long trip, even if what you are sending isn't supposed to go very far.

It will be interesting to see how this works for international travel. And it will be interesting to see how the AirTagAlex tracker fares on the YouTuber's next tracking test, a trip to Norway.