Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverRed | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing would be incredible built in to expensive portable electronics. My bf recently lost his very expensive sony earbuds while on holiday and once its not in the hotel room or your bags, its basically gone. The most likely situation is it was at one of the public transport lost item collections but calling up everywhere we had been was too much work.

Airtags would have found them most likely.

View on HN

I can’t wait for an AirTag-enabled AirPods case! I misplace that often.

The AirPods case can already be tracked, but annoyingly you can't make it make a sound. If you leave a single AirPod out, you can make it make a sound, but for me this is useless because I always misplace the case (with AirPods inside). I don't see why it's not possible to have the AirPods make noise from within the case. I understand the sound would be muffled by the case itself, but that's still better than nothing!

Can they be tracked? Every time I try, the map location is seriously out of date

Instructions here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207581

Fun fact: Tile actually partners with device manufacturers to embed Tile into their products. For example, the Skullcandy Crusher Evo wireless headphones have Tile built-in.

https://www.skullcandy.com/crusher-evo-wireless-headphones

I use a cheap rubber case for my AirPods that has a little loop for a keyring that I use to attach a Tile to [0]. It's a little bulky compared to the naked case but it has a few of advantages.

First, it allows you to say "find my AirPods" to your phone and the Siri shortcut will launch the tile app and ring your AirPods. Second, the silicon is really grippy so it's far less likely to fall out of your pockets, and third the keychain ring means I can store it on a keyhook by the door which is my system for not loosing my keys in the first place, and usually obviates the need for the Tile:)

I do agree that having the UWB transmitter built into the case would be better provided it doesn't require the case having charge to work, which isn't always going to be true.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/xTGpTOC

The challenge is that you need a.) an easy way to attach in some manner which doesn't work very well on a small product and b.) you need to be able to triage what small subset of things you really want to track.

Yes, building in helps. Though it probably opens up a variety of privacy/security failure modes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com