Connect with us

Technologies

I’m Putting Apple AirTags in Every Suitcase I Own, and They’re on Sale Now at Amazon

I track everything from keys to cars using Apple AirTags. And now that you can get a four-pack for almost $20 off at both Amazon and Best Buy, it’s a good time to stock up.

I knew something was wrong as I stood at the baggage carousel after a return flight from France and my trusty rolling suitcase was nowhere to be seen, even as my fellow passengers collected their bags one by one. My suitcase never did drop onto the carousel that day.

However, I knew there was no reason to panic. Before handing over my suitcase at check-in at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, I had tucked a sophisticated little tracking device into it. So, with just a few taps on my iPhone, I could see that my bag had apparently never left Paris. (Merde!)

Over the years, I’ve come to rely on Apple’s AirTags to keep track of just about all my easy-to-lose valuables. They’re not only good for suitcases; I also use them to track keys, bikes and even my car. I tell everyone who will listen that you can never have too many of these handy devices. That’s why I think it’s worth taking full advantage of sales at both Amazon and Best Buy that slash the price of a four-pack of AirTags down to $80.  

Here’s how the Apple AirTag that was in my suitcase on that fateful trip works. It uses an ingenious method of tracking itself, detecting its location from nearby iPhones and using them to anonymously piggyback the coordinates to a secure server where I could look it up on my iPhone. Until just a few years ago, this would have seemed like a scene straight out of a spy movie.

Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money.

Instead of wondering if my belongings were stuck on an abandoned luggage cart or strewn across the tarmac, I could see in almost real time that my suitcase was still chilling at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I was able to calmly tell the airline my bag didn’t make the flight, and it made arrangements to have it delivered to me a few days later.

HEADPHONE DEALS OF THE WEEK

Deals are selected by the CNET Group commerce team, and may be unrelated to this article.

Apple AirTags are all about peace of mind

By itself, an AirTag isn’t much. A 1.26-inch smooth round puck that looks like a glossy white breath mint, it sinks to the bottom of a bag or dangles from a key chain (with a compatible key ring, sold separately). It’s meant to disappear.

Activating the AirTag was a simple process of pairing with my iPhone. And then, because it obviously doesn’t really do anything out of the box, I forgot about it.

But the next time I couldn’t find my keys? Sorcery. My iPhone didn’t just tell me they were somewhere nearby — it walked me directly to them, thanks to the AirTag’s built-in Ultra Wideband chip. Suddenly, all that time I’d spent retracing my steps and overturning couch cushions in the past felt like ancient history.

Now I have AirTags in or attached to every significant item I’d want to keep track of: My everyday laptop bag, my camera backpack, the suitcase I use most when traveling, my key chain, my car and a smaller sling bag I take on walks. I can pull up the Find My app on any of my Apple devices (or sign in to iCloud on any web browser) and see where my items are and the last time the AirTags registered their locations.

AirTags aren’t just for my everyday items. People I know in the movie business tell me that AirTags are tossed into nearly every bag and Pelican crate, not solely to ensure that the valuable equipment inside doesn’t walk away but to quickly differentiate equipment amid similar looking containers. Some of my friends also attach AirTags to their pets’ collars (though experts say there are better ways to track pets).

AirTags are also useful for things that you want to keep close by

Being able to detect my luggage a continent away provided a sense of relief, to be sure. But at the local level, my AirTags will also trigger an alert when I get too far away from them. For example, if I accidentally forget my camera bag in the car when I stop somewhere for lunch, a Find My notification appears telling me I’ve left it behind. It works the same for newer AirPods models as well.

Impulse Buys Under $25 That Make Surprisingly Great Gifts

+17 More

See all photos

Sharing is now a big part of AirTag tracking

My family has two cars, and I wanted to be able to track them both. But it used to be inconvenient to pair the AirTag in the car my wife drives to her iPhone (and the one in my car to my iPhone).

To guard against unwanted tracking, an AirTag will notify nearby iPhones of its existence, so whenever I drove my wife’s car without her in it, I got a notification that an AirTag was traveling with me. (If the owner is near the AirTag, the alert does not appear.)

However, ever since the release of iOS 17, AirTags are shareable, which solves this problem. I shared my AirTag with my wife, and she with me, so regardless of which car I’m driving, I can find it more easily in a crowded parking lot without getting constant, unnecessary alerts.

A new feature to AirTags that arrived with iOS 18.2 is the ability to temporarily share an AirTag’s location with someone I trust. In my luggage example above, if the suitcase was in the airport with me, but the airport’s staff hadn’t yet been able to locate it (not uncommon during peak travel times), I could share its location with an attendant who could quickly retrieve it from areas inaccessible to the public.

Apple AirTag specs

  • Diameter: 1.26 inches (31.9 mm)
  • Height: 0.31 inches (8 mm)
  • Weight: 0.39 ounces (11 g)
  • Splash, water and dust resistance: Rated IP67 (maximum depth of 1 meter up to 30 minutes)
  • Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0
  • Battery: Replaceable CR2032 coin cell battery

The only minor annoyance about AirTags

An AirTag includes Bluetooth, the U1 Ultra Wideband chip and an NFC chip to share basic details when it’s in Lost Mode. That’s all powered by a CR2032 coin cell battery, which in my experience lasts roughly a year before I need to replace it.

I get notified when a battery is starting to get low, although there’s no gauge to see how much is left until it goes into the red. And it’s easy to change batteries. But my small fleet of AirTags means I need to swap multiple ones each year. I buy them in packs of 20 that I slowly work through.

AirTags also make great gifts

Apple AirTags consistently appear in our gift guides throughout the year because you can always find another use for one. They’re often reduced in price when sold in packs of four. And there’s an ever-growing ecosystem of ways to mount them, from sturdy vaults that adhere to a car to discrete fabric holders that will keep your favorite classic bomber jacket from flying away. Whenever I show someone how I use AirTags on a bag or keychain, I kind of wish I had a pocket of AirTags to hand out because once someone sees how it works, they’re sold.

Looking to save on more things that’ll make your life easier? Check out our roundup of all the best early Memorial Day deals going on now. We’ve also gathered all the best AirTag accessories of 2025 from across the web so you can get the most use out of them.

Related Topics:

Technologies

Here’s How to Watch the New ‘Scream 7’ Trailer and Stream All the Past Movies

You like scary movies, right? The original Scream from 1996 is streaming for free with ads.

Do you like scary movies? Scream fans will recognize that line, and they received an early Halloween treat on Thursday with the release of a new trailer for Scream 7. Neve Campbell’s return as series heroine Sidney Prescott battling a new Ghostface killer could be the reason to revisit earlier spooky films in the franchise.

The upcoming Scream 7 revolves around Prescott’s facing a masked, knife-wielding murderer (yeah, you know what the mask looks like) who targets her family. It doesn’t hit theaters until Feb. 27, but if you’d like to get prepared and nab some Halloween scares, here’s how to stream Scream 1-6.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

How to stream the Scream movies on Halloween

Continue Reading

Technologies

ARC Raiders Beginner’s Guide: 7 Tips You’ll Need to Thrive Above Speranza

When a new extraction shooter drops, players quickly learn how brutal death can be. Here’s how to avoid the sting of losing hours of progress.

Developer Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders is the latest extraction shooter that’s set to take the gaming world by storm. As genre veterans and newcomers alike emerge from the underground town of Speranza to take on killer robots — and their fellow humans — players quickly learn how brutal it is to lose loot on death.

Luckily, ARC Raiders is the most «casual» extraction shooter I’ve ever played. That isn’t to say that it’s an easy game, but there are built-in mechanics that make the hardcore gameplay loop far more accessible to a wider audience.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

This guide will equip you with the knowledge you need to make real progress in ARC Raiders before, during and after a raid. Read on to find out about what keybinds you need to learn, what loot to focus on first and how you can quickly recoup some wealth after a string of failed runs.

Figure out your shoulder swap keybind before you ever load into a match

ARC Raiders is a third-person shooter with high-stakes player-versus-player combat. If you want to stand a chance against an enemy player in a serious firefight, you need to know how to swap your camera view from aiming over your character’s right shoulder to aiming over their left shoulder so you can peek around corners without exposing yourself too much.

The default bind for this action on PC is «X,» so get used to pressing that key — or swap it to something you’re more comfortable with. Switching the camera from shoulder to shoulder will help you peek around corners before you expose your body, eliminating blind spots and giving you a competitive advantage. In a game where one death could eliminate hours of progress, you certainly don’t want to give up crucial lines of sight.

Nothing to lose, everything to gain: Utilize the free loadouts

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve just suffered consecutive squad wipes, you’ll never be without a gun, simple medicine and other basic supplies. You can opt to enter a raid with a «free loadout,» which will provide you with a hodgepodge of low-grade gear. Unlike in other extraction shooters (looking at you, Escape From Tarkov) there’s no cooldown period on taking a free loadout into a match — you can do so whenever you like.

You can’t carry as much weight or pack out as much loot as you’d be able to with any other class mod on, but this is a great way to try to hit a heavily trafficked zone without the risk of losing your good weapons. As a bonus, if you manage to extract with a free loadout, you can trade the «free loadout» mod for a basic green-tier class mod at the vendor named Lance in Speranza.

Focus on completing quests for the denizens of Speranza

ARC Raiders largely cuts you loose to raid, engage in gunfights with other players and loot whatever you like at the start of the game. But it’s highly recommended to follow the guided progression path to get some extra equipment, learn what activities you can get involved in topside and unlock harder missions with more valuable rewards.

Always check in with Speranza’s traders after each raid to see what quests you can take on (or turn in). Some quests will require you to bring certain items back from a raid, and others will have you battling ARC robots or completing objectives throughout the world. Make sure to keep completing quests in order to discover all of the secrets ARC Raiders has to offer.

Loot the dog collar ASAP

Scrappy is a rooster that sits around Speranza collecting crafting materials while you’re out fighting killer machines. He brings the scrap back home to you because he’s a very good boy. Reward him with a dog collar so he feels loved — and so that he levels up and brings you loot even more quickly.

The looting rooster can be upgraded multiple times, but you should focus on finding the dog collar while on a surface run to bring him up to level two at first. The dog collar can be found in random containers, but during the press previews I had the good fortune of finding one at The Dam map’s research and administration area.

When you’re searching for scrap, prioritize big pieces of loot

You’ll find lots of metal scrap, plastic tubing and miscellaneous wires as you rifle through loot containers topside. These are definitely worth stuffing into your pockets; they’re the bread and butter of crafting materials and something you’ll want to stash away early on.

You’ll probably run into what’s a «good problem» to have sooner or later: running out of carry space mid-raid. Raw materials can quickly overflow your inventory, forcing you to extract early. Instead, focus on larger pieces of tech like TVs, radios and big chunks of ARC robots.

Once you successfully extract these items from a match, you can break them down into their parts to gain a variety of crafting components. In a way, they act like compact storage units for multiple raw materials at once.

Grow your net worth. No, seriously

I know, this sounds like the mantra for a bad internet con artist. But building up a small nest egg in ARC Raiders is a great way to ensure you can throw together backup loadouts if you meet an untimely end multiple times in a row. This is bad enough on your own, but if you’re squadding up with friends, you don’t want to be the only one without a good loadout.

If you can’t find the specific materials you’re looking for during a raid, it’s well worth looking for valuables instead. Jewelry, vases and other creature comforts fetch a pretty penny when you sell them to the traders in Speranza. Once you’ve saved up a couple thousand coins, you can trade them in for new weapons, attachments and even stash upgrades.

Guns aren’t the end all, be all of ARC Raiders combat

While it’s incredibly gratifying to run into the thick of battle and wipe a squad out with a strong submachine gun or pick off straggling raiders from afar with a leveled-up bolt-action rifle, you can’t always rely on your guns to win a fight. ARC Raiders features tons of gadgets and deployable equipment that can quickly turn the tide of a fight if used correctly.

Grappling hooks and ziplines add a new level of verticality to gunfights, while high-explosive grenades can flush enemies out of cover. Deployable walls and smoke grenades can counter these tactics or let players safely blitz a wide-open area. If you want to get really clever, you can bring throwable noise lures that will cause ARC robots to converge on your enemies — the AI will do the dirty work and won’t even loot the bodies.

Your strategies are limited if you don’t bring a couple pieces of gear. Consider leaving that extra stack of shield rechargers in your stash — if you need 10 of them in a single match, you probably have bigger problems — and grab a couple of grenades for your next raid instead.

Continue Reading

Technologies

Warframe Has Come to Starfinder in a New Tabletop Module, and It’s Awesome

Operation: Orias makes a solid attempt at bringing the online shooter experience to your gaming table, and it’s available now.

I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games for nearly 30 years, and if there’s one constant throughout that time, it’s a ceaseless effort to bring concepts from books, movies and games to the table. It makes sense. The original TTRPGs were heavily influenced by the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and so many other writers of the era, but this is also true of sci-fi games. Today, the folks behind the popular free game Warframe have announced a partnership with Starfinder to release an adventure that brings the two games together called Operation: Orias.

Before fans of either franchise start dreaming of a world where you’ll be able to wield your favorite Frames to spectacularly devastating effect across the Desna’s Path galaxy, Operation: Orias takes place quite far away from the Starfinder story as you know it today. Instead, this module takes place in the Origin System, and the Protoframes you have access to in this adventure won’t play exactly the same as the online game. That said, if you’re a fan of either or both games you are in for an absolute treat.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Without spoiling too much about the adventure itself, Operation: Orias gives a game master everything they need to send four players as the Hex syndicate against familiar adversaries like Infested, Corpus and Grineer in a four- to six-hour adventure. While this leans heavily on Warframe: 1999 for the details, in a brief interview with Pathfinder Creative Director Luis Loza, it became clear a lot of work went into balancing the frenetic Warframe experience in TTRPG form. When asked about this effort, Loza highlighted efforts to account for the speed and constant action of a video game.

«I tried to make sure that I was able to translate as much of the intense feel of the game as possible with abilities that sold the idea of speed and intensity, even when moving at the turn-based pace of a TTRPG,» Loza said. «Characters have the ability to leap great distances in a single movement and offensive abilities that help them attack multiple enemies en masse. The enemies are also a bit on the weaker side, so players can take them out quickly, which helps get the power from the video game across.»

Starfinder x Warframe: Operation Orias is available now at Paizo for $9 if you want the PDF version, or $13 for the full color 20-page booklet. If you’ve never played Starfinder before or if it’s been a minute, you will need the Second Edition Core Rulebook to play this adventure, which will run you an additional $20 for the PDF version or $70 for the print version. For you dice goblins out there, the Warframe store has a beautiful seven-piece dice set with a matching dark blue tray themed for this adventure, which you can preorder for $40. And for those who love playing online, this whole experience can be enjoyed via the Roll20 system with ease.

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © Verum World Media