Did you lose your AirPods?
alexyancey.com
alexyancey.com
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.
This is a frequent problem - only for some people.
Want me to blow your mind? The REASON for this is the case. Everyone always suggests cleaning, but that won’t help for the long term. I know because I have tried.
I took a pair of tweezers and bent the metal contacts in the case outward. That was a year ago. I have not had a single issue since. Not one. I am willing to bet Apple brushed a manufacturing defect under the rug. YMMV and if your airpods are under warranty, consider that first, but after having the issue with first gen and second gen, I wasn’t about to deal with nonsense.
What? that doesn't sound like Apple at all. They would never do that. I get butterflies just thinking that.
I see what you did there.
But they came out of the box functioning perfectly, and stayed that way until tiny specks of dust inevitably entered the picture. The entire saga was extremely boneheaded and after I took mine in for a replacement (which, I must say, was out of warranty and only cost me time) I vowed to never buy another MacBook which had that absurd keyboard. Fortunately I didn't have to, they went back to the proven design which is a true beast and just keeps chugging along for years without a single missed or repeated keystroke.
But this is very different from shipping products with known _manufacturing_ defects, and then 'brushing it under the rug', presumably by not issuing a recall. I can't recall even the former happening with post-iPod era Apple products, let alone the latter.
In this particular case, the most likely culprit is pushing the AirPod into the charging slot with enough force to bend down the contact. There isn't a way to manufacture a spring contact which isn't vulnerable to this, and the fix is easy if you have thin enough tweezers. If Apple shipped an edition of AirPods cases with bad contacts, which didn't charge out of the box, it's a safe bet that there would be press about it. Maybe there was, but if so, I missed the 635 comment HN thread about it.
Unless Person B also tells you that in general their air pods only last 30 minutes playing music.
As stated, their percentage of power level fall vs person A is 2000% more being generous (person A said a week, not a night). If it was because of the battery, the air pods would also last way way way less playing music.
Also in my experience, the brassiere was never perfect about guaranteeing the AirPods Max were put perfectly into a sleep state. The same exact issue could sometimes occur, maybe an alignment issue. The AirPods Max sound fantastic, but there's a lot of little details about them where Apple just kind of dropped the ball.
This is like blaming people for not locking their door after they’ve been robbed. Yeah, they should have locked their door. But the person who actually did wrong is the person who robbed them.
Blaming somebody for not taking extra steps to reduce the chances of something happening to them that is ultimately the fault of another party is not right.
Our society has elements that will harm us. It is up to us to take action to reduce the likelihood of that happening.
How did you determine it's an iOS bug?
I seem to be the only person this happens to, but the won't-charge-in-the-case problem was so bad with my original airpods pro that Apple ended up replacing the case, then the airpods pro and the case, over a very frustrating several months of back and forth. My new airpods pro were fine for maybe eight months, but the problem has started again. So far it's only once every few weeks, which I can live with.
For some reason, my AirPods silently connect to my iPhone while they're in their case and both devices are asleep. Why they do this, I have no clue. Just quality 2020s Apple programming.
Anyways, there's an easy solution: go into the settings app (not the drop down menu) and turn off Bluetooth on your phone/ipad when you don't need it. Your AirPods will no longer randomly drain at night. Neither will your Apple Pencil, if you have one of those.
You'll find a lot of comments on Apple support forums/reddit/etc saying it's impossible for it to be Bluetooth and that you should never turn it off for any reason because it's crazy. People for some reason are very assertive about that. But they're wrong. I now make a habit of only turning Bluetooth on precisely when I need it and immediately turn it off afterwards and now nothing gets drained needlessly.
Now the only AirPods bug that drives me insane is the volume randomly shooting up halfway to max randomly sometimes when I connect to my computer, but I made a script to somewhat fix it.
That's why I said you need to do it through settings directly. Otherwise it won't do anything.
Apple themselves even says if you want to turn off Bluetooth, you need to do it through settings: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102412
Otherwise it's merely a temporary disconnect.
Maybe it was because it was quite a lengthy washing cycle?
I think they're supposed to withstand some degree of moisture, but I don't believe they're designed specifically to be submerged. However, one of mine (gen 2 airpods) got fully submerged for maybe 3 seconds in the bathtub but it managed to start working again when I let it dry out.
I'm not saying I recommend others treat their AirPods as if they're water resistant but, in my experience, all the generations of AirPods can take a bit of a water beating. The only ones I've never done this with are any of the Pro models.
I did not and will not complain. I have owned over a hundred pairs of headphones/earbuds in my lifetime and these things are the best, by FAR.
However, don’t wash them.
You realize that this is not a warranty issue, right?
So many things used to come with cheap earbuds or headphones. A pocket radio. A portable CD player. A cheap MP3 player. A laptop. I've even had some small TVs come with headphones out of the box. So there's like 40+ sets I didn't even ask for over the years. Pretty much all immediate trash.
Then there are the ones I bought in a pinch. Go on a trip, realize I didn't bring my headphones, swing by the store and get a cheap pair. Being a cheap pair, they often didn't last long. There's another dozen sets.
Now the ones I actually wanted. Not all have replaceable cups or pads, so they'd often wear out after a few years. Or they were USB, and the circuitry started freaking out after a few years. On top of that I probably have different sets for different use cases. A pair for on the go. A pair for the computer. A pair for the HiFi system. A pair for the office.
You can buy a replacement for about 50% of the price of a new set (complete with charger case).
One night I dropped my case as I crossed the street to my building. I grabbed it off the ground without paying attention, both buds had fallen out.
In the morning, I picked up the case and noticed that it felt light. Find My reported both buds as having been seen outside on the sidewalk, one last seen four hours ago, the other six. I ran downstairs and outside to find them both smashed by car traffic.
Another time a bud popped out of the case while passing through the TSA X-rays (yes, I have lousy luck with these). I was able to pinpoint the direction with the app and make it plays sounds, but the agents were unable to dig under the rollers and get it out.
I’d love to have more control over then charge cycle like that.
I love that when you drop the case, the AirPods scatter into the farthest reaches of wherever you are – favorite feature
I bought one for my luggage, and when boarding a train in Paris, I was informed that I left my luggage behind. Went back to grab my luggage, boarded my train and then bought more AirTags at the first opportunity. I’ve used them multiple times to prove my lost luggage is in the airport, countless times to track shipping of high-value goods and countless times to find my keys.
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.
I understand the op was trying to do a good deed, but if I saw an unexpected message like that I would definitely hit “Delete and Report Junk” instead of just “Delete”.
https://maxread.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-all-those...
Discussion of above - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31949731
They don't just block your account in one fell swoop, first indicators and messaging will stop working for a few hours. And you can hit that at least a few times without a ban. After a few times of that it was clear it wouldn't be worth running what I had, so I stopped before any sort of permanent banning.
No idea why it happened, but Apple support was able to reset it on a phone call.
My theory is that they'd kept a non-active SIM in their phone for a long time, and the phone had tried to repeatedly verify/link that phone number to their Apple ID (via challenge SMS, I believe), thereby exceeding some rate limit.
Gotta love that such rate limits exist and do occasionally hit legitimate users, but at the same time, there are paid lookup-as-a-service APIs out there as mentioned in TFA...
Google should take note.
That too.
High audio quality, no rush and no signs of them being an underpaid call center operator, always going the extra mile to help me.
Even at the Apple Store, they help with out-of-warranty items all the time. I recently gave away an iPhone 8 and they helped my friend setup.
A nice woman there gave me new rubber-thingies for my AirPods and it's been out of warranty for the longest time. I mean they never checked or anything.
I've been trying to get a paid game the past days for my kids, a game where you try use bolts to remove wooden planks. It only exists with IAP and/or ads. The ads are terrible and not tailored to children. Nor are all the dark patterns. And you can get rid of the ads. By paying you get rid of them!!.. for 24 hours.
I'd rather pay via App Store or Google Play Store or Steam or whatever. Even a subscription for a month would've been better.
The last time there was an issue with an Apple Care payment. I was forwarded to someone who I believe was actually in Apple’s Dutch accounting department (certainly not a help desk drone). They called me back to follow up and even after everything was sorted out to check if everything was looking good on my end.
But past that hurdle, at least my actual problems got resolved satisfactorily.
But I also expect them to know the sender/receiver, and I imagine if I click “Delete and Report Junk” button, that I would probably submit the unencrypted contents of that whole conversation to Apple. And they should have also have metrics of total sends vs reported sends.
This is documented (not the 99% figure, but the situation) by Apple in knowledge base articles on the apple.com website.
The e2ee in iMessage is effectively irrelevant, as for most people, most of the time, it functions just like Telegram (which is not e2ee).
Personally, a few months ago I enabled Advanced Data Protection (ADP) which afaik does make iCloud backups (including messages), Photos, iCloud Drive and few other things inaccessible to Apple.
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 - https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-prote...
Whether you trust that Apple actually did throw away their keys after enabling the feature is a different story, but it’s good enough for me.
When enabling ADP there’s multiple warnings about how you’ll end up completely locked out if you lose all your devices / lose recovery keys / lose all hardware authenticators. Iirc I was also forced to register at least 2 yubikeys. For anyone tech savvy you should enable ADP.
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.
My lost tag is (presumably) attached to my keys at the bottom of a lake. I refuse to delete it from findmy.
But, it was attached to the handles with one of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B34Y5YZS
There are people who dive down and find lost stuff on the bottom of lakes, and people who go magnet fishing, they still might find your keys!
I went back to my Apple Store and explained the problem. After demonstrating that a reset didn’t fix the problem, they gave me a new AirTag and kept the old one.
When I paired the new AirTag, the old one suddenly reappeared in my list! It spent some three weeks at the Apple Store, then about two weeks in Poland and now it’s been in a Dutch warehouse for about three months - last seen 17 hours ago.
I don’t know why it’s spending so much time in a Dutch warehouse - perhaps it’s Apples junkyard in Europe.
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.
Isn't that regulated? In many places the operators are required to let you take the number with you when you change provider to obtain a better/ cheaper service. Everybody's numbers in practice go via some LUT that's mapping a human "telephone number" which people dial to an actual service endpoint which might move (after all, cell phones already move, so this indirection was necessary to make that work) and so the rule only needs to say that there's some means by which company A gets to change the LUT for your phone instead of company B.
First time I got a cell phone in the US I was surprised I had to tell T-mobile my postal code and got a "local" number.
Now the comic is more like “where you lived in 2005 or when you first got a cell phone”.
Now that I have kids it’s an interesting signaling mechanism seeing which parents have local area codes and which ones have them from other parts of the country.
What's interesting is Colorado Springs ranks #2. I'm guessing that's because the Air Force Academy is there, which would make sense because it draws people from all over the country.
Rank. City / % Born in state / Geo diversity index
01. Las Vegas / 25.3% / 82.7
02. Colorado Springs / 33.8% / 80.1
03. Seattle / 38.1% / 79.3
04. Washington, D.C. / 36.2% / 78.8
05. Denver / 41.1% / 77.4
06. Portland / 39.1% / 77.3
07. Mesa / 38.8% / 77.2
08. Phoenix / 40.6% / 77.2
09. Virginia Beach / 39.8% / 77.0
10. San Francisco / 40.1% / 76.8
11. Charlotte / 41.3% / 76.4
12. Boston / 43.7% / 76.1
13. San Diego / 45.5% / 74.8
14. Tucson / 45.8% / 74.2
15. Raleigh / 47.2% / 72.5
16. Oakland / 48.2% / 72.1
17. Los Angeles / 45.6% / 71.8
18. New York / 48.4% / 71.1
19. San Jose / 47.3% / 69.8
20. Jacksonville / 50.6% / 69.8
21. Nashville / 51.8% / 68.8
22. Austin / 53.3% / 68.3
23. Minneapolis / 51.9% / 68.0
24. Atlanta / 51.3% / 67.7
25. Houston / 51.9% / 67.7
26. Albuquerque / 53.4% / 67.6
27. Tulsa / 54.5% / 66.2
28. Dallas / 55.0% / 64.9
29. Kansas City / 54.4% / 64.8
30. Oklahoma City / 56.8% / 64.3
31. Fort Worth / 57.5% / 63.8
32. Long Beach / 56.9% / 63.6
33. Chicago / 59.5% / 61.9
34. Sacramento / 59.5% / 61.9
35. El Paso / 61.9% / 61.9
36. Miami / 29.8% / 61.2
37. Omaha / 59.3% / 61.1
38. Wichita / 63.7% / 57.0
39. Columbus / 64.5% / 56.5
40. San Antonio / 65.5% / 54.9
41. Milwaukee / 65.7% / 54.5
42. Fresno / 66.2% / 53.6
43. Indianapolis / 66.5% / 53.6
44. Memphis / 65.9% / 52.8
45. Philadelphia / 67.9% / 52.3
46. Baltimore / 67.6% / 52.1
47. Louisville / 70.4% / 48.8
48. New Orleans / 70.9% / 47.8
49. Cleveland / 73.1% / 45.0
50. Detroit / 74.5% / 42.4
Source: scraped from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-ranks... (from 2016, but probably still about the same)
Same in Poland.
The North American numberig plan looks like +1-AAA-BBB-CCCC Where AAA is the area code and BBB-CCCC is mostly meaningless. There are a few special area codes like 8xx for toll-free calls (the classic 1-800 numbers that businesses often use) but no prefix dedicated to mobile.
When I moved to Ireland I thought it was weird that mobile numbers were identifiable. Especially since I had a Google voice number which looked like a landline which really confused people and websites. "Trust me, just text it. It is fine."
> Do you get a new number if you move
I don't know about the US but this used to be common in Canada. Many providers would consider calls to different cities long distance and charge extra. So if you moved it was "polite" to get a new number so that people could call you for local rates. For example I went to university in Ottawa and changed my Toronto number so that people didn't have to pay long distance to call (even though it is the same province, about a 5h drive).
However this isn't really the case anymore. In the US and mostly in Canada country-wide calling us pretty standard so most people's mobile number will reflect where they grew up, and they will carry that around for the rest of their lives.
> and then change to a different provider?
Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.
Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?
Luckily this is mostly behind us, almost all providers offer Canada-wide as a standard feature. Canada+US is becoming the common default.
Of course the problem with this system is that you need to worry about what plan the caller has. So if you want to be very sure that locals can call without paying long-distance rates it is still best to get a local number. But I think that in almost all cases the need for this has passed.
From the outset, what actually costs money is the (telephone) network. But people were often reluctant to pay the true cost of access to the network at first - so for a long period the providers charged for calls. After all if the average person receives 100+ minutes of incoming calls per month, but is only willing to pay you $15 for the network access which you want $25 for, you can take their $15 and then charge 10 cents per minute for calls to get the same net revenue...
In the US in particular the government regulators allowed operating companies to significantly overcharge for long distance in order to subsidise local calls. This creates market distortion which was judged worth it to facilitate widespread rollout of telephony. They probably should have reined it in much earlier, but hey, the basic idea worked.
Atlantic Canada is small enough that there was a single area code for Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia up until a few years ago.
Cellphones in the region tend to have their own CO code (first three digits of the phone number), so you can usually infer if it’s a number you can text or not.
This is also the case for different regions of NS and PEI, so seeing a 902 number where the CO number is different from what you’re used to makes it seem “exotic”. This was also handy back in the day to know whether it was long distance or not.
This is slowly eroding as numbers get ported out, and landlines get disconnected.
There's a way around this that I've done a few times. You port the number to VOIP (I use voip.ms) and then you set up that number to forward to whatever the new number you get given. Dialing out you still get your new number, but people dialing you can use the old number.
This was super handy when I had to move my mom from a retirement home in one city to another city a province away.
When we started getting cell phones, the numbers all had the same first six digits. The last four were assigned in order of provisioning.
My friend and I got our phones at nearly the same time, so our numbers were like 555-555-1004 and 555-555-1008.
This came in handy when I was going to visit him years later, and my phone died on the plane. I didn’t have anyone’s cell number memorized other than my parents (555-555-1013) and his thanks to the numeric similarity. (We kept the same phone numbers when we moved away from home.)
In this town, landline phones also all shared the same first six digits. Before cell phones got into the mix in the late 1990s, people could (and did) use 5 digits to represent phone numbers: 3-XXXX where the 3 referred to the first digit of the “exchange code”. The next town was 8-XXXX, etc.
I have no idea if he was given an option but our numbers were sequential. X, X+1, and X+2.
Not sure how it’s done. Maybe there’s a code system.
Also for the biggest service provider, it always displays Ahmedabad as the city for some reason.
In the USA, the number reflects the area it was issued. So my phone number matches suburban DC. If I move to California, everybody would know I lived in DC in the past. Kind of odd, I guess, but is a leftover from when cell homes didn’t exist and then when numbers weren’t portable across providers.
Also, 03 is guaranteed to cost the same as 02 but has no specific geographic link, so it's often used for helplines, customer service, that sort of thing, and for people who want to have a landline (or multiple landlines) but do not want to reveal their location.
04, 05 and 06 are part of that roped off space we reserved in expectation of a need that's now unlikely to ever materialise, oh well. In the era when it was conceived people thought "Internet shopping" was a ludicrous idea and still imagined "Video calls" would be a thing you'd do as a telephone call somewhow - so what did they know.
07 as you said is where non-geographic mobiles live, as well as some other services at similar price points
08 is "free" or sometimes revenue sharing prefixes and the 09 prefix is where "premium" services live, you know "Chat live now to singles in your area".
They are portable in Europe (I said that in the second part of my comment), but it seemed like they weren’t in the US, because otherwise, the post is a bit strange. The author just tried every number from his area code to find the owner, when it is possible/likely that the owner has a completely different area code. That’s why I thought it might be that the current number always reflects the actual area code.
I have an old utah number that I've taken around to several states and I always get fun conversations when people ask what I did there.
In modern times however, the area code is largely irrelevant. You get assigned a number with the area code of the place you first opened your account, and then you can just keep that number forever if you want. I've had the same number for almost 20 years and I've had four different providers in that time. Porting a number between carriers has been a standardized process for a very long time.
> The episode also featured the New York area code 646. When the 212 area code ran out of numbers, 646 was created. Elaine gets a new number with the 646 area code. She is not happy with the new number because she believes the area code makes it too long to dial. She is proved correct when attempting to give her number to a man in the park. Initially eager, he reads the number, asks if it is in New Jersey. Her response is, "No, it's just like 212 except they multiplied every number by 3…and added 1 to the middle number." He says he is already in a relationship and walks off.
I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.
Alas, if you move out of the country for a period of time, it is a challenge to maintain the host country phone service. So there are no guarantees that you can hold on to that signifier of "this is where I was the last time I wanted to get a new phone subscription".
So the tattoo might be the better choice.
Anyway, they had to get new cellphone numbers because they'd get awful/no customer service if, say, they dropped their truck off for repairs and left a California 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?
Add in the inconvenience of not having them for somewhere between a few days and forever, and I'd also say they aren't really cheap but still it probably isn't worth the effort in that situation.
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.
Landing page is totally misleading, I had big plans, but changing diapers took priority.
Long time ago I came across very similar concept in use in India. Not much, but visible usage. I also came to know by looking at a sticker on car windshield.
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.
$100 to guarantee your device back is a small price to pay apart from the insult of paying the thief.
It was a joke... mostly
Day dreamed about a system where instead of spending 30 bucks to replace my fancy QC later PD car charger I could pay a bribe of 10 bucks to the homeless person to whom a car charger was completely useless anyway with essentially no resale value.
(An emergency has to be a real emergency, not "it's urgent to the landlord")
So why I find this weird is, did the thief just leave a stolen phone, charged, in their apartment laying around for anyone to see? And if so, how would the janitor even see the lockscreen, wouldn't they have to hit the power button to see it (I presume the screen is off by default?). And why was the janitor even in the apartment? And presumably without the thief in their apartment?
And worse, why would the janitor effectively steal a phone from a tenant, and go outside and sell it to you for $100, just because there was a message on the lockscreen. How did the janitor know you didn't somehow hack the owner's phone, and you were the thief?
NOTE: I'm sure the story is true, but I'm curious if it's just a stupid thief, or.. what.
Whatever I'm not understanding, good job on getting your phone back.
I spent a few days wondering if I had just lost hearing in that ear, but no.
After that terrible experience i couldn’t justify the expense of buying an other apple airpod.
The Pros, on the other hand, in spite of me generally being quite careful with them (in contrast to the basic AirPods) had their noise canceling crap out at about the 2 year mark, and currently are slightly louder in one ear than the other (but the microphone still works, so they remain in service).
So, overall, I think I’ve had a similar experience to you with the Pros, but have been quite impressed with the non-Pro model.
Use some blue tack to gently clean out the microphone grate(s) periodically. As it becomes obstructed noise cancellation suffers.
I went to an Apple store to see if I could get them replaced since I knew there was a recall on one version. They refused since mine was the version that came out after the recalled version.
That soured me on AirPods. Luckily it was a work-issued pair, so they were free.
AirPods are disappointing, but convenient. I guess that's why we buy them.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/AirPods+Pro+Battery+Replacement...
Beyond that, the whole culture is to repair things because there isn't an official Apple store. They can also import parts from China and elsewhere.
Here is pricing to get parts from Singapore... most expensive repair is $100...
Anecdotally, I think I noticed a difference, but I also chalked it up to prematurely-degrading hardware...
I have one pair where the left bud doesn’t connect until I put it back in and take it out of the case a few times.
One where one bud doesn’t charge properly.
And one with declining noise cancellation.
They are great when they work properly, but I do think quality is slightly lacking for a relatively expensive product.
I was surprised at the quality, and they've lasted a couple years already at almost daily use.
The nice part is, if I lose them, no big deal. I bought a 2nd pair as a backup.
The noise cancellation is the weak part. The microphone or related hardware breaks and then you get all kinds of plops and squeals unless you turn noise cancellation off. Somehow they tend to do that about 3 to 6 months after warranty...
I engraved my entire phone number, including the +1, and I’ve had my AirPod returned to me twice now.
Also the 1 helps balance/center the phone number.
NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/us/airpod-hit-and-run-flo...
Cache: https://archive.ph/sRHFV
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 got the stay for free after that, they reversed the charges and apologized.
"my that is a handsome tree" -> do something bold. now wake up with that tree in your yard the next day and every day after.
that’s true freedom
why track it? if i woke up to discover a freethinking, freewheeling apex man of action took my tree, i would just admire them. and flattered this caliber of person thought i had anything worth seizing. i wouldn’t tell the police. (but if i could track it, i might go visit it to witness the man i wish i was)
if i was my girlfriend i might put a tracker into my finest tree, and leave me for any man that might ever take the tree. i couldn’t blame her. i would admire her
I think we take for granted how easily these things come to us as tech people.
I believe newer ones can be found 'anywhere' like an airtag.
It even works for the case without the AirPods in it. That part is definitely new, since the original cases didn't have any wireless hardware in them (and depended on at least one AirPod being in it to report their battery level, for example); the new ones have their own Bluetooth/UWB chain.
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.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lost-wallets-are-more-li...
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.
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.
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.
They have no cellular reception hardware. How to they transmit their location to Apple?
All the Apple devices (and now, rolling out, all the Google Play Services enabled devices) scan for nearby Bluetooth LE beacons (that use their protocol) and upload (with some cryptographic operation) the location of the device who found the beacon, together with the accuracy (signal strength) to a proprietary server (Google or Apple).
Then, with the respective apps, the key holder can retrieve the reports for a given key hash and decrypt them to get the previous location. Technically speaking, anyone with the key hash can fetch the encrypted location reports from Apple / Google servers, but they can't decrypt them. On top of that, the key is rotating every 15 minutes (AirTag in paired mode) and there is no way to know that two keys are connected... unless you own the main key that is used to derive the rolling keys (see "update" and "diversify" in the linked paper).
Now, all of this is fantastic, until you think of this as a monopoly. Apple and Google get an interesting tax on every device that gets built and joins this network (IIRC it's 4$ for partner devices in the Apple network).
My problem with this is that no-one else other than Google and Apple can build an "open" network - you'd have to find a way to push your code to everyone's devices.
I'm surprised no-one is investigating this unfair practice.
See: https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2021-0045 and https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
If you want a non-Apple, non-Google solution, you go to the OG tracker tag -- Tile. You have to install their app, so the reach won't be nearly as extensive, but that is fine by me -- the last thing I want is a third party developer able to push code to my device without me explicitly installing it.
Tile, as you mentioned, will never get any reach since users have to opt-in to start contributing to the location data, making their network incredibly smaller compared to Apple's or Google's own networks.
If you're Tile - you have no way to start such a network because you'd have to convince every single iPhone user (or Android user) to install your app, while Google / Apple can just do it with the push of a button (kind of!)
My point was about starting your own network with a similar coverage - it's nearly impossible. Thus competing with Apple or Google here is extremely difficult.
Alternatively (since the adv data is limited), a "routing" endpoint that allows custom endpoints to be defined depending on the network ID.
There are plenty of possible implementations that would allow for a fair market in this regard, but I don't think Apple or Google would ever introduce them, unless forced to
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?
I would say a high percentage of people do that, but portland may not have as many transplants as other cities
Yeah it was a weird assumption and I’m glad it worked
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_metropolitan_area,_Or...
I used this feature recently, after my mom passed. She had the same home number we grew up with, for fifty years. I ported it over as a second line on my mobile. Partly nostalgia (okay, mostly), partly because it was a pretty great number for memorization; it has an excellent number pattern.
"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
As for audio quality, should anyone be interested: I had also bought a pair of those wired, ~$1 ones, and I'd say that the Xioami J18 have slightly better audio quality, but that's cancelled out by the occasional bluetooth glitches, and the deafening "CONNECTED" message when you turn them on. They also have better audio quality than the ~$25 Sony on-ear headphones by a considerable margin, but that completely pales in comparison with my Audio-Technica ATH-M40x over-ear headphones, which are like having a hi-fi strapped to your head!
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.
Also, despite all the press hysteria, "unlawful people" aren't so common that a bunch of 80 messages will automatically bring them out of the woodwork. Most people are decent.
If I hadn’t gotten lucky in finding them in <10 texts, I may have abandoned the idea. Only one other person tried to claim they were the owner.
I’m definitely not replying to it.
> We confirmed that the AirPods paired, which wouldn't be possible if they didn't belong to them.
All it helps is remove a bit of spam. As the author writes, they checked pairing, but before that you can simply ask "Where do you think you lost them?"