The “Find My” app won’t magically find your lost AirPods after all

“Find my “ is a great tool for locating lost Apple products, except when it isn’t. Did you leave your iPhone in a taxi? You can track its location through Find My on another device. Your keys are lost somewhere in the house? If they have an AirTag attached, Find My can help you locate them instantly. But when it comes to finding your lost AirPods, a feature Apple is touting high time with the launch of iOS 15–Find My is functional useless in all but the most limited scenarios.

To imagine: ANDou are on your way to the gym, AirPods in hand. You get in your car, drive to the gym parking lot and walk into the gym, only to find that your AirPods have given up on you like the One Ring. “No problem”, you think, “I’m just going to check out the Find My app.” You launch Find My, and, wouldn’t you know, it says the AirPods are back home.

So you go home. You take another look at the Find My app, which says you should be right on top of your AirPods. You check the driveway, the yard, tear up your living room—nothing. Discouraged, you return to the gym, only to find your AirPods lying down on the ground in the parking lot. What. The. Hell.

You can’t rely on the location of your AirPods in Find My

Let’s explain what’s going on here. The original AirPods, AirPods 2, and the Beats products that support Find My — none have some way to communicate with Find My network by themselves. As such, they rely on your other Apple devices to update their location for them. It wouldn’t be that bad, except the location update only happens when says ethe arbuds can sign in to your Apple devices. This means that your AirPods must be out of their case. Find My will not work at all when they are inside, even if you have your phone in one hand and your case in the other, Find My will not be able to see the current of your AirPods site.

Let’s think about your gym scenario. If you listened to your AirPods right before getting in the car and then took them out to drive, Find My recorded their last location as in your driveway. So yeahour AirPods slipped from your pocket when you got out the car to the gym, corn because your AirPods usare not logged into your iPhone at this time, Find My has no idea they are in the parking lot; as far as he’s concerned, your AirPods are always right back home.

These limits mean Find My just isn’t a convenient way to locate AirPods, like, already. The only time the app is useful is if you misplace your headphones while they’re out of the case and connected to your Apple device. If you fall asleep listening to them and they get tangled in the bedding, you can use the Find My app to see where they are and even at make them play a sound so you can find them. But if they are in the case that has fallen behind your bedside table overnight, Find My cannot see them or ping them.

You can Find my AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, sort of

Now, Apple’s more expensive AirPods are a different story: AirPods Pro and AirPods Max received firmware update 4A400 Tuesday, October 5 which adds a new Find My feature, making the service a bit more useful to find your lost headphones. Not only will AirPods Pro and AirPods Max update their location when they are within range of your Apple devices, but they will too. when it is within reach of other Apple devices. This is how AirTags share their location with Find My, and it makes it much easier to find Apple’s more expensive AirPods products.

These devices now also work with AirTags’ “Find Near Me” feature, which allows you to use your iPhone to locate the device in question. It’s not as accurate with AirPods Pro and AirPods Max as it is with AirTags, as the first ones lack the U1 chip from AirTags, but it’s a great tool to help locate your earbuds to a more precise degree. . You can also put these devices in lost mode, get notified when they are found, configure separation alerts, and play a sound to locate your AirPods Pro in the case, although it is quite muted.

With that in mind, let’s get back to the gym situation: If you had a pair of AirPods Pro, they would keep updating their location until they were out of range of your iPhone. This means that you would see your AirPods Pro in the gym parking lot on Find My, rather than back home. If your headphones were later retrieved by another Apple user before you had a chance to first find them, that person’s iPhone or Find My compatible Apple device would also update the location of your headphones. AirPods Pro. (If you left your AirPods Pro on the bus or train, finding them will be much more iffier a prospect.)

Of course, neither of these cases technology is almost as useful as on iPhone, because your phone can always update its position on its own using GPS. But with this update, Find My at least works a lot better; on condition of having gushed for AirPods Pro or AirPods Max it might in fact reunite you with your misplaced headphones. For AirPods, AirPods 2, and Beats users, however, the app is still extremely limited, meaning almost useless.. Just something to Keep this in mind the next time you stick with it these headphones in your loosest poached.