Did you lose your AirPods?

A week later, I got a Find My notification that they had been spotted – at the same sports field. I figured what the hell, put on a podcast and drove the hour to see if I could find them. Worst case scenario, a couple of hours of driving.

Using Find My and the directional feature points you in the right direction to within feet, I found them in the tall grass.

The case had been perfectly watertight, and they'd barely lost a percent of power in a week. Remarkable really all round.

I would be terrified of doing something like that, I imagine the account could get flagged for spam, and hearing the various tech horror stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could end up suspending your iCloud account with everything on it, blacklisting hardware devices linked to it, and who knows what else.

One of the AirTags actually flew around internationally for a week or so (London, Amsterdam, back to the US a few times!) but sadly after about a week there were no more updates.

Someone must have found the AirTag in whatever baggage container it was stuck in and removed the battery.

I still have the AirTag in FindMy, one day I suppose I'll delete it but I sometimes wonder what happened to it.

Did the person who found it just throw it out? Do recovered AirTags go back to Apple to be recycled and resold? Does the CEO of American Airlines, Robert Isom, have a scrooge-mc-duck-esque pool of lost AirPods he swims around in? Sometimes I wonder.

In Germany the cellphone area code is just out of a range your provider has registered and if you move to a different provider, you typically move over your number.

I went to look at Find My to see where they were, but unfortunately I was in South Korea, and little did I know the location function in Find My doesn't work there.

I thought it must have fallen out of my pocket while I was in the taxi, as I remembered having them as I got off the plane, and I have a bit of history with my earphones falling out of my pockets.

I took a taxi from the taxi rank at the airport, so there was no record of who drove me like with Uber, but luckily I paid by card, and I could see what taxi company I used.

I asked the staff at the hotel if they could help me call the taxi company to see if they could find out which driver dropped me off. They somehow managed to contact the driver, but he had not seen my AirPods.

I went about the rest of my day while trying to convince myself that I didn't need a new pair. But while the location doesn't work with Find My, I could still play a sound through the case. So I would randomly hit it a few times hoping it was actually hidden away in my things.

After losing all hope, later when I returned to my hotel room I found a note had been left for me saying the taxi driver had found my AirPods and turned them in to a local police station!

Feeling excited I wouldn't have to go on the rest of my holiday without earphones, I happily made an hour long trip across the city to collect my AirPods, arriving just as the station was closing.

I tried briefly (not as hard as the author) to figure out who they belonged to but had no luck.

I called Apple support and gave the serial number, but they told me there wasn’t anything they could do if the owner did not mark them as lost via the Bluetooth settings page. Even though at that point Apple presumably had all the information necessary to contact the original owner…

So I cleaned the AirPods and have been using them since. Is there any way for me to find the owner if I have no info about the owners area code like the author did?

After bugging the police for weeks, they finally met with me to look at my evidence. We met directly outside of the apartment. They didn’t leave their SUV.

A week later I got the phone back , because you can place a message on the lock screen remotely. The janitor of the apartment called me because I offered ( and paid ) a 100 dollar reward and a number they could reach me at.

Not sure if there is a lesson here, except the feature of remotely changing a Lock Screen message is a great feature.

The main goal was to contact car owners without having to have their phone numbers and such. But i quickly saw the advantage of tagging all sort of things. So I have it on my keychain, wallet, or several other things I own. If I lose these items, any stranger can contact me without having any of my personal contacts.

What is it? It's a QR code. You scan it, and you can send some prewritten notifications to the owner. Once they reply, you can have a conversation. Scanning captures the gps location both for security measures and to help recover it.

https://web.ottomon.net/join

Landing page is totally misleading, I had big plans, but changing diapers took priority.

I engraved my entire phone number, including the +1, and I’ve had my AirPod returned to me twice now.

Now the Find My app reports them in a small town near where I „lost“ them, ca 600km from my home, and clearly someone is using and charging them (with Android? Because otherwise the „Lost“ functionality would be nagging them constantly).

I won’t drive there (what would I even do if I found the person?), but this is quite maddening. I‘d rather not know where they are.

I lost my AirPods Pro in an Uber back in January, and they’ve been in Lost Mode ever since, and I regularly see them moving around between three or so different places on the Find My map. Nobody ever reached out to me, but if it doesn’t even show your number I guess they wouldn’t be able to…

I found an airtag in a parking lot last year. It behaved a bit strangely even with a fresh battery and resetting it, and it still seemed the owner had not marked it lost. A friend who was an Apple rep told me it was probably defective and to just throw it away. I put it in the garage meaning to take it to the hazardous waste facility and forgot about it for about 8 months. Came across it again and just for grins and giggles I gave it one more try -- it seems the owner finally did mark it lost, and I was able to pair it to my iPad. So I have an extra airtag now...

Some people would say it's creepy to do stuff like this, but creatively exercising your talents to reunite people with their lost stuff is a net win in my book.

I have lost my airpods, back in 2020 (it was the start of covid and I was taking off a mask in Thailand and flipped them out of my ears). I noticed they were missing twenty minutes later, used find my to get back to where I dropped them, had them make noise and found one of them.

In some cases if it’s lost being able to put a reward message on the screen is valuable too beyond the price of the device.

Apple could also put an AirTag in the AirPod cases for then those go away. Phone relative tracking is nice until batteries die.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/49fb6b48ba104885a846ea4f6f2...

Fix is essentially to sign out/sign in to all devices. For me, that’s a real PITA. Apple magic is magic until it ain’t.

Found the case neatly put next to a mailbox.

Earbud one about 15m / 50 ft away. Earbud 2 appeared in the seine river.. I guess some threw it in the river.

tl;dr: Don't live in Austin. That Google building's security people were thieves.

Reasons: Nonviolent crimes aren't policed in ATX because they're short ~300 officers. And, it also isn't prosecuted because the DA has the same views as other big cities, leading to more crime and a city death spiral.

They have no cellular reception hardware. How to they transmit their location to Apple?

Props to the author for helping the user find their missing AirPods! I believe your story. If I see another story similar to this I may find it harder to believe.

They could also be local but with a non-Portland area code. Generally, at least if you are using a nationwide cell phone carrier, you can move to another area code and keep your number.

I wonder what percent of people do that?

  "And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind."

https://electronics.sony.com/audio/headphones/in-ear/p/mdrex...

have purchased 4 already, happy with my decision

Unless you have a way to verify they're truthful owners, I would ask something like "I have something that might belong to you, did you lose anything in the past few days?"

EDIT: I missed the part about verification, my bad.