Apple has seemingly foiled its characteristically tight-lipped approach to new product launches by evidently mistakenly confirming one in an unrelated YouTube tutorial on its support channel.
The apparent mistake was first spotted by the blog Appleosophy, which noticed the feature tucked into a Settings screen midway through a tutorial about erasing iPhone data. According to screenshots from before the video was yanked from the channel, Apple shows a demonstration that pulls up the Find My screen that displays an “Enable Offline Finding” option to enable “the device and AirTags to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular.
We reached out to Apple about the apparent mistake but did not immediately hear back.
AirTags has been a long-rumored tracker tag technology from Apple meant to compete with products like Tile. 9to5Mac—which reported the name for the seemingly forthcoming product back in October—separately reported last month on iOS 14 code that indicated that the product would be able to be enabled up “in bulk” in iOS (presumably meaning you could buy and activate multiple units at once) and that, like Tile, the product would run on a replaceable battery. They’re also expected to play a sound to help users locate missing items, the site reported.
Given that the video that the AirTags toggle was shown in has since been taken down, it’s probably safe to assume that Apple’s hoping to keep a lid on this product before it’s able to tout the technology on its own terms. I’ll absolutely be waiting for a Tile competitor to help me find my missing gadgets—specifically the easily-misplaced Apple TV remote that’s always disappearing into the cushions of my sofa.
