Finding Value

I lose things a lot. Sometimes they’re just misplaced, sometimes gone forever. I don’t know if I have ever run out of ink in a pen—there’s too many chances to lose such a small daily use tool like that. It costs $1.

But I’ve been working on losing things less. I’m building habits about which pocket of my backpack is for my earbuds, where my car keys go when I am in the house, a mental checklist for my pockets. So I thought maybe I was ready for a more expensive writing implement. I bought a colored pencil that can swap between five or six different colors. I enjoyed using it to annotate knitting patterns and accent notes in meetings and conferences. Yes, enjoyed, past tense. I only managed to hang on to it for about six months. I’m not sure it’s worth re-buying twice a year. It costs $10.

For work, it’s beneficial to have the latest Apple technology. So I ordered an iPad Pro and Pencil promptly, and picked the iPad up at my local Apple store the same day. The iPad is nice, but so far it’s just more iPad—more glass, more pixels, more weight. What I’m really looking forward to is the new interactions enabled by the Pencil. I strongly prefer to handwrite notes in meetings, and I’ve been thinking of developing my drawing skill. Mine won’t ship for another couple weeks, but the internet says the Pencil is roughly the same size as a traditional writing implement, so presumably just as easy to lose. It costs $100.

I used to misplace my iPhone a lot. I’d rush about the house, trying to replay the moment I’d last used it. I’d wonder if I’d left it at work. Then Find My iPhone came along. I still mostly rushed about the house, but when that failed, I could use an iPad to make it ping, or confirm that it was left at work after all. This year, I stopped rushing about or using Find My iPhone, because I got an Apple Watch which is connected to my phone via bluetooth, so pinging it is just a swipe and a tap on my wrist away.

The thing I fear losing the most is my wallet. The couple times it has happened have been pretty awful. Total emotional meltdowns. Fortunately, it’s always been recoverable—so far. I recently attached a quarter-sized bluetooth TrackR device to it, and paired it with their iPhone app. So my Watch is strapped to my wrist, and it can find my phone, which can find my wallet. Yay, bluetooth! I have a couple more tags, which will probably end up on my car keys, my sunglasses case, and maybe the cat.

So, back to the Pencil. It is a small, expensive device, which I basically expect to lose. And I don’t see a good way to attach a TrackR to its sleek exterior. But! It is bluetooth-paired to a rather large iPad. There’s no microphone, either in the official description or in the teardown, so it probably can’t be pinged. But maybe an iPad app could still give you a vague hotter/colder indicator? Or if it went out of range, the GPS location of the last time they were together?

An app like that could literally save me $100.