These new sneakers have a secret AirTags compartment to track your child’s location – but they’re dividing opinion among parents
- Skechers has a new range of sneakers to help parents keep track of their child
- The Find My Skechers shoes have a hidden slot for an Apple AirTag
- It lets you locate your kid using Apple’s Find My app
Many parents want to keep track of their children’s whereabouts, particularly if they’re visiting an unfamiliar location, but that’s not always an easy thing to do. Now a new range of sneakers from Skechers offers a novel solution: each pair contains a hidden compartment designed to house an Apple AirTag tracker.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen AirTags hidden in a set of footwear, but the difference here is that the Find My Skechers line is designed specifically for kids. Each pair comes with a small cutout in the heel made to store an AirTag – to access it, you just lift the insole and the webbed liner underneath it. This reveals a screw-shut AirTag holder that conceals the tracker, and Skechers says your child won’t feel it while wearing the shoes.
Once the AirTag is in place, you can track its location using Apple’s Find My app. The idea is that the hidden compartment will protect the AirTag without interfering with its wireless capabilities.
The Find My Skechers sneakers are available in a range of sizes and designs. They’re also machine washable, although we’d recommend removing the AirTag before you toss these shoes in with your laundry.
Better protection
Knowing your child’s location is obviously an important concern for a lot of parents, and there are devices that let you clip an AirTag or other tracker to your child before they leave the house. But there’s always the possibility that these products could be damaged or tampered with by the child.
Skechers’ new sneakers could avoid that by burying the AirTag inside the shoe itself, making it tougher for the child to get to and offering better protection from the elements. They also lack any branding that would hint that there’s an AirTag inside them, enabling the wearer to blend in and avoid the gaze of people who might target them based on the AirTag connection.
But the question remains over whether Find My Skechers are a good idea. From a quick survey of TechRadar writers who are raising kids of their own, the point was made that toddlers and young children are likely to grow out of these shoes quickly. At $52 to $58 a pop, that’s a cost that quickly adds up when you need to buy new ones every six months.
As well as that, kids at the older end of the target market might have phones of their own anyway, which can be used to track their location. That means there are question marks over how necessary Skechers sneakers are, at least for some parents.
Find My Skechers start at $52 per pair, and are available for both toddlers and young children. We’ll have to see how effective they are, but they’re likely to turn parents’ heads one way or another.
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