How to find lost AirPods with "Find" and precautions

How to find your lost AirPods with "Find" and precautions

Find My is a great tool for finding lost Apple products, but it's not always great. If you lose your AirPods, which Apple touted with the release of iOS 15, the Find My feature is useless except in very limited scenarios. Please try to imagine. You're heading to the gym with your AirPods in hand. I drive my car to Jim's parking lot, enter the gym, and find that my AirPods are missing. You think, "Okay, let's check the Find My app." When you launch the Find My app, it says your AirPods are back at your house. So I drive home. Looking at the Find My app again, it says the AirPods should be nearby. I checked the driveway, the garden, and the living room, but couldn't find it. Disappointed, I return to the gym to find my AirPods on the ground in the parking lot. Oh my god!

Find My AirPods Locations Are Unreliable

Let me explain what's going on here. The original AirPods, AirPods 2, and Beats products with Find My don't have the means to communicate with the Find My network on their own. As a result, it relies on other Apple devices for location updates. This shouldn't be too much of a problem. Except that location updates only happen when the earbuds are connected to an Apple device. In other words, the AirPods must be out of the case. Even if you have a smartphone in one hand and a case in the other, "Find" can't check the current location of the AirPods. Consider a scenario at the gym. If you listen to your AirPods just before you get in your car and take them off to drive, Find My will record their last location as the driveway. Later, when I got out of my car at the gym, my AirPods slipped out of my pocket, but since they weren't connected to my iPhone at the time, Find Me didn't know they were in the parking lot, and I was still at home. is supposed to be in With these limitations, Find My is no longer a practical way to locate AirPods. This app is only useful if you misplace your AirPods while they are out of the case and connected to your Apple device. If you fall asleep while listening to your AirPods and get caught in the futon, you can use the Find My app to check where they are, or you can make the AirPods make a sound to find them. However, if the AirPods fall behind the nightstand while still in the case, "Find" will not be able to see the location information or ring the AirPods.