PlugBug with Find My is a strange beast — but, then, most of Twelve South’s products are. The firm has made its name releasing clever and idiosyncratic Apple accessories for edge cases that are large enough to sustain a small but loyal fanbase.
In the past, that’s included products like the AirFly, an adapter for using AirPods to listen to the plane’s seatback entertainment system. There’s also the simply named BookBook, which disguises iPhones as old leather-bound tomes.
PlugBug, meanwhile, is a wall adapter with Find My functionality. The accessory, which starts at $70, anticipates a time when — for better or worse — every small, misplaceable object can be found with your phone.
As someone who constantly misplaces everything, I appreciate the concept. I’ve left my share of power cables and plugs behind at airport and convention center walls. I also recently went through a big move and have spent much of the past few weeks finding lost cables and chargers at the bottom of boxes.
It’s a good idea, and it earned PlugBug the title of “first USB-C charger that includes Find My.” Having had the entry-level PlugBug 50 in my possession for a bit now, there are two key issues with the implementation. The first is the price: $70 will get you a 50-watt, two-port standard model, while the four-port 120 watt model runs, fittingly, $120. The “travel” versions of the above add international adapters for another $10.
The other issue is size. Twelve South is positioning the plug as slim. What qualifies as slim is subjective, certainly. Over the years, however, the bar has continued to rise. And it’s come a long way from the big, bulky PlugBugs from a dozen or so years back. As charging technologies have improved, you’ve had to devote far less suitcase space to plugs.
The addition of Find My technology and the separate watch battery it requires necessarily make the plug larger. This is precisely what makes the new PlugBug such a strange chimera. The battery has its own door on the rear of the device.
“Due to specific electrical regulations, the power for the Find My portion of PlugBug is completely separate and isolated from the AC charger,” Twelve South writes. “To power Find My, PlugBug uses the same replaceable button battery as the Apple AirTag, and should last about a year.”
Set up requires you open this, pull off the tab, and press a button. And that’s it. Once finished, it gets added to your list of objects in the Find My app, along with everything you’ve attached an AirTag to.
From there, it functions like any other bit of Find My-enabled hardware. You can set it to alert you when you leave it behind or take advantage on the onboard speaker, which beeps so you can find it under a pile of laundry. It’s genuinely handy for those of us who habitually misplace small stuff.
The equation comes down to how much you pay for chargers normally and how often you actually lose them. If the answer to either of those is “a lot,” it might make sense to make space for the new PlugBug in your life.
