How does the air tag tell you where it is?

Airtag?

Perhaps the most unpopular product in Apple's recent release is Airtag? 

Airtag is Apple's location tracking accessory. If you hang it on a car key or wallet that you often lose, you can find it instantly without wandering around.

Let's take a look at the scenario in which this device works. 

The air tag tracks the location in three ways. 

The first one is the sound. 

When you press the Play Sound button on the "Find Me" app, the air tag makes a "Beep Beep!" sound. Find the sound and you'll find the missing item. This is almost the same principle as finding devices such as iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods. When the app tells Airtag to make a sound, it sounds like a warning tone.

The second is precision tracking. 

This is also done by pressing the "Find" button on the "My Search" app. You need an iPhone to use this method, but the location of the air tag you are looking for appears on the iPhone screen. The direction and distance appear as if you were playing a compass or a treasure hunt. If you follow it, you can check the location.

The third is map tracking.

I'm trying to figure out what's going on out of the house. It also shows the location of the air tag on the map in the "My Search" app so that you can look at the map and find it if you left the item outside. The role of Airtag is to tell the location of items that are easy to lose.

Apple has a worldwide network?

How can this air tag locate itself and let the user know? When you think about smartphones, satellite-based location recognition, including GPS and GLONASS, cellular networks such as LTE and 5G, and location tracking based on wireless LAN addresses are combined. And smartphones have communication technology, so it's not hard to tell where you are.

Then, do all the chips such as LTE, GPS, and wireless LAN go into this small air tag and find out the location like a smartphone? That's not true. Airtag is a low-power Internet of Things device that operates for over a year with a coin-shaped lithium cell. GPS, wireless LAN, and LTE are considered taboo technologies. It's accurate and fast, but it consumes a lot of power.

There are three ways Airtag communicates with the world. Low power Bluetooth, Ultra Wideband (UWB), and NFC. They are the most representative low-power communication methods. No, so how do we locate them with these? It's using Apple's "My Search Network."

'My Search Network' is a network created by Apple. This network is not built by establishing a network and building a router, but by the way our Apple devices become a base station. As I said before, the iPhone itself is a perfect device for locating and communicating. Although there are differences between iPad and Mac products, they are roughly located and connected to a nearly complete communication network.

And these Apple devices are connected to each other like a network, acting as a very small base station. Because Apple's devices are already hundreds of millions of units on Earth, if you move a little, or if you stay still, someone can pass around and communicate with each other. Airtag also receives current location information from the devices, communicating slightly with people's iPhones, iPads and Macs.

My device's got a base station, dust collecting, connecting the world.

Did you happen to think, "Can someone else's air tag be connected to my device?" Yes, in fact, not only air tags, but also other people's iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, all of them are connected together like a network. However, this network does not carry personal information, identify individuals, or transfer data. It's only used to find devices.

For example, if you lose your MacBook and send a signal to the Mac to make a sound through the "My Search" app, the "My Search Network" tells Apple devices around the world to "Raise your hand if you saw this serial number MacBook." Most definitely, if your lost MacBook is connected to the Internet, you can immediately signal "I'm alive" to "My Search Network" and get location information. 

But if the lost MacBook is not connected to the Internet, you can communicate with the device around the device and let them know, "I saw it here." If you tell me to make a sound, I can make a sound. Airtag is a device that removes the function of making positional signals and sounds through Bluetooth, excluding direct communication.

In the end, "My Search Network" is a network where many people who use Apple devices can allocate a little bit of resources to help ease their concerns about device loss regardless of the normal communication environment. This is also called "collectivity" or "crowd sourcing" because everyone enjoys safer use of devices by giving up resources little by little.

This network does not have a significant impact on security, performance, power, etc. on my device. Of course, there may be a very small amount of power loss, but low-power Bluetooth communication is difficult to notice power consumption. You can use it for a year with a battery that went into the air tag right away.

Apple's Internet of Things Interpretation

The communication method is a little different when the air tag is close to my iPhone. At this time, a chip called U1 works with Bluetooth. U1 is Apple's Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication chipset. Ultra wideband is a technology that sends and receives signals at very high bandwidth frequencies. It's also called "ultra-wide communication." 5G is also used for ultra-fast data transmission through ultra-wide bands. Apple uses this signal to locate.

AirTags exchange information about distance with iPhones through high bandwidth, i.e., short-frequency radio waves. Apple once placed a microcontroller U1 chip on iPhone 11 that could use the UWB. This technology also allowed us to pinpoint who would send the files to and from the airdrop wirelessly. Apple created my search network around this time, so I think Airtag might have come up with an idea in 2019.

Airtag basically identifies the current location based on these two communications and informs the user of the location information. In a way, the location itself is unknown, but we can provide important information about the combination of devices and the location through the ecosystem-generated network. And that location information is again expanding the realm of the Internet of Things.

In fact, Apple was interested in the Internet of Things field early on and is still accessing many devices from this perspective. If you think about it now, it's not difficult to build an air tag for iBeacon, which reads the distance of the sensor and provides information. Augmented reality, one of Apple's most laborious areas, is also one of the ways to connect things to the digital world.

Airtag is simply a location-finding device, but in other words, it's one of the scenarios that Apple thinks is connecting the Internet of Things, the real world with the virtual world. Naturally, you will be able to imagine other devices using this network and sensors. Like a car.