Find My App Won’t Magically Find Your Lost AirPods
Find Me is a great tool for finding lost Apple products, unless it isn’t. Left your iPhone in a taxi? You can track its location using Find My on another device. Are your keys lost somewhere in the house? If they have an AirTag attached to them, Find My helps you find them instantly. But when it comes to finding lost AirPods – a feature that Apple has been touting widely with the release of iOS 15 – Find My is useless in all but the most limited cases.
Imagine walking to the gym with AirPods in hand. You get in your car, drive to the gym parking lot, and walk into the gym, only to find your AirPods have left you like the One Ring. No problem, you think, I’ll just check the Find Me app. You fire up Find My, and if you didn’t know, it says AirPods are back at your home.
So you go home. Take another look at the Find My app, which says you should be right on top of your AirPods. You check your driveway, your yard, you break through your living room – nothing. Dejected, you return to the gym to find your AirPods on the ground in the parking lot. What. File. Hell.
You cannot rely on the location of your AirPods in Find My
Let’s explain what’s going on here. Original AirPods, AirPods 2 and Beats products that support Find My – no one has the ability to connect to the Find My network on their own. Thus, they rely on your other Apple devices to update their location for them. That wouldn’t be too bad, except that the location update only happens when the specified earbuds can connect to your Apple devices. This means your AirPods must be outside of their case. Find My won’t work at all when they’re inside it – even if you hold the phone in one hand and the case in the other, Find My won’t be able to see the current location of your AirPods.
Let’s think about your gym scenario. If you listened to your AirPods right before getting in your car and then pulled them out to drive, Find My recorded their last location, just like in your driveway. Then your AirPods slid out of your pocket when you got out of your car at the gym, but since your AirPods weren’t connected to your iPhone at the time, Find My doesn’t know they’re parked; As for your AirPods, they are still in your home.
These restrictions mean Find My is simply not the practical way to find AirPods like it ever was . The only time the app might come in handy is if you’ve lost your earbuds when they’re not in the case and plugged into your Apple device. If you fall asleep listening to them and they are tangled in bed, you can use the Find Me app to see where they are and even have them play a sound so you can find them. But if they are in a suitcase that fell behind your nightstand overnight, Find My will not be able to see them or make them ping.
You can find my AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, something like
Apple’s more expensive AirPods are a different story altogether: AirPods Pro and AirPods Max received the 4A400 firmware update on Tuesday October 5th, which adds a new Find Me feature, making this service more useful for finding lost headphones. AirPods Pro and AirPods Max will update their location not only within range of your Apple devices, but also within range of other Apple devices. This way AirTags share their location with Find My, making it much easier to find more expensive AirPods from Apple.
These devices now also work with the Find Nearby feature of AirTags, which allows you to use your iPhone to track the device in question. It’s not as accurate with AirPods Pro and AirPods Max as it is with AirTags, as the former lacks the AirTags U1 chip, but it’s a great tool to help you more accurately locate your headphones. You can also put these devices in Lost Mode, get notified when they are detected, set up split alerts, and play sound to find AirPods Pro in the case, although that sound will be rather muffled.
With that in mind, let’s go back to the gym situation: if you had a pair of AirPods Pro , they would keep updating their location until they got out of range of your iPhone. This means you’ll see your AirPods Pro in the gym parking lot on Find My, not at home. If your headphones were picked up by another Apple user before you were able to find them first, that person’s iPhone or Apple device with Find My will also update the location of your AirPods Pro. (If you left your AirPods Pro on the bus or train, it will be much more difficult to find them.)
Of course, none of the examples of this technology are as useful as on the iPhone, as your phone can always update its location on its own using GPS. But with this update, Find My at least works much better; assuming you’ve upgraded to AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, they can actually reconnect you with your lost earbuds. However, for AirPods, AirPods 2 and Beats users, the app remains extremely limited, meaning almost useless. Just keep that in mind the next time you tuck your headphones into the clearest pocket.