Technologies

I Use Apple AirTags to Track Everything From My Luggage to My Keys, and a 4-Pack Is Down to Just $68 for Prime Day

This is the lowest I’ve seen this year, so if you’re planning a vacation anytime soon, now is a good time to stock up on these trackers.

Amazon Prime Day sale: Apple’s AirTags are available right now on Amazon for $68 for a four-pack during Amazon’s July Prime Day sale event. That brings them down to $17 each, which is close to the lowest price we’ve seen, but we don’t expect this deal to stick around.

Not long ago, as I waited at baggage claim after a trip to Paris, I became increasingly nervous as bag after bag dropped onto the carousel, none of them mine. I knew there was no need to panic, though. Back at Charles de Gaulle airport, I had dropped a sophisticated little tracking device into my trusty rolling suitcase before handing it over and heading to my gate. So, I pulled out my iPhone and, with just a few taps, I could see that my bag had never left the City of Light. (Merde!)

Over the years, I’ve come to depend on Apple’s AirTags to keep track of many types of easy-to-lose valuables. They’re not just good for luggage. I also use them to track wallets, bikes, keys and even my car. I tell everyone who will listen that you can never have too many of these handy devices.

Here’s how the Apple AirTag (like the one 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.

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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.

Apple AirTags are all about peace of mind

By itself, an AirTag isn’t much. A smooth, round, 1.26-inch 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 also 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 your 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.

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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 more recent feature 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 full of AirTags to hand out because once someone sees how it works, they’re sold.

When will this deal expire?

We don’t know how long this deal will last. We saw four-packs available at this discounted price earlier this year, but it could expire at any time without notice. I recommend placing your order while you can be sure to get this price, because I’m confident you’ll find new uses for them once you have a few.

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Technologies

WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September

Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.

PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.

Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.

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

WWE 2K25

Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.

Persona 5 Tactica

Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.

Other games on PS Plus

Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.

*Premium subscribers only.

For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.

Technologies

Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween

The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.

I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.

This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.

In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.

It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.

Surviving your little nightmares

While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.

The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.

While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.

But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.

And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.

This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.

In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)

But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.

Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.