Put a tracker in everything

I am, by temperament, suspicious of gadget categories. Most of them exist to solve a problem you didn’t have until the advert explained it to you. So when I say that item trackers — AirTags and their Android-flavoured cousins — are the rare category with no real downside, understand that this admission costs me something. I’ve tried to find the catch. I’m still looking. In the meantime, there’s one in everything I own that moves.

Insurance priced like a snack

Think of a tracker not as a gadget but as an insurance policy, because that’s what it actually is. The premium is the purchase price spread over years of use, plus a battery now and then — all in, less per year than one of those airport sandwiches that costs what a restaurant meal should and tastes of refrigeration. The payout is knowing, at any moment, where the thing actually is. Not where a system says it should be. Where it is.

Ordinary insurance compensates you after the loss. This kind frequently prevents the loss becoming one at all, which is a much better trade, and one the insurance industry has understandably not rushed to explain.

The checked-bag case

The flagship use is the checked bag, and anyone who has flown through a busy hub understands why. There is a particular species of dread that begins the moment your suitcase trundles away behind the rubber curtains, and traditionally nothing cures it until the carousel either produces the bag or doesn’t. With a tracker, the dread is replaced by information. I’ve sat in a departure lounge and watched my bag make its own little journey across the airfield and — this is the good bit — arrive at the aircraft before I did. It’s oddly moving, like watching a child get itself to school.

And when things go wrong, the tracker changes the conversation entirely. The traditional lost-luggage exchange involves a weary agent, a system insisting the bag is “in transit”, and you, powerless. Now you can turn your phone around and show them precisely where the bag is sitting — occasionally in a building the system doesn’t think it’s in. I’ll hedge the legalities and say only this: it is remarkable how quickly “we have no information” becomes “let me make a call” when the passenger has better data than the airline.

Beyond the suitcase

Luggage is merely the gateway. Keys are the obvious next candidate — the tracker on my keyring has paid for itself in recovered mornings alone. For wallets, there are card-format trackers the thickness of a couple of credit cards that slide into a slot and simply live there; you forget them until the day you’d have otherwise lost the wallet, at which point they become the best thing you own.

The laptop bag gets one, because it’s the single most expensive and most-forgotten object in my life — left in taxis, under conference tables, in the overhead bin of at least one aircraft I’d rather not discuss. And then there’s the car. Anyone who has emerged from a long-haul flight into a vast multi-storey airport car park, holding a ticket stub with no floor written on it, knows that a tracker in the glovebox is worth more in that moment than most of the technology in the car itself.

The sober notes

Now the honest section, because every purchase deserves one. First, batteries. Most trackers run on coin cells that last around a year, and the failure mode is silent — the tracker doesn’t limp, it simply stops. So the annual battery swap needs to become a ritual, like smoke-alarm day. I do the whole fleet at once; individually remembering eight batteries is a hobby, doing them together is maintenance.

Second, the network effect, which is the closest thing to fine print here. These trackers don’t have their own connection; they whisper to passing phones, which relay the location. That means a tracker is only as good as the density of compatible phones around it — and, as I write this, that arithmetic rather favours one fruit-themed ecosystem, particularly abroad. The Android networks have improved, but if your bag is going to strange places, the crowd finding it matters as much as the tag itself.

When your own tracker tattles on you

There’s one behaviour worth knowing about in advance, because the first time it happens it’s genuinely unsettling. To stop these devices being used to follow people — a real problem the manufacturers were rightly pushed to address — phones now announce unknown trackers travelling with them. The protections are important and I’m glad they exist. They are also occasionally overzealous: borrow your spouse’s car, or carry a colleague’s bag, and your phone may solemnly inform you that you’re being stalked by your own household. Expect the odd chirp from a suitcase in a quiet moment. It’s not haunted; it’s compliant.

The verdict, such as it is

Every gadget category I’ve ever written about comes with a “but”. Smart homes: but the complexity. Wearables: but the charging. This one’s buts are a battery ritual and an occasional false alarm from your own luggage — trivia, honestly. Against that: lost keys found, a wallet that announces itself, a car park demystified, and the quiet luxury of watching your bag board its flight while you finish your coffee. Put a tracker in everything. It’s the cheapest calm you’ll ever buy.