Into Thin AirPods

I agree - it's the most exasperating thing about what's otherwise a very civilised community.

There's a million different writing styles. No one expects every book in the library to be written to your particular taste. But for any piece of writing submitted to HN, if it deviates from a dispassionate, terse, action-filled style, the tl;dr crowd come out and start ordering people "don't write" like this.

I lost a pair of airpods (swiped out of my office at midnight! wtf!?) and to this day I casually open the find my app to check on them, and they bounced around locally for a few days before making their way to somewhere in Turkey. They still seem active, despite being in lost mode (they shouldn't work in lost mode unless there's a known exploit?).

Also, I've tried dozens of times to get my own airpods to play a sound from the find my app, just to see what it sounds like and have never gotten any sound to actually play. I am not sure what I am doing wrong.

That sounds like such a sad place to be, in a one-sided 'relationship' with everyone else, letting their personal choices get under your skin. They don't even note your existence, and that must hurt.

Yes! Some may feel the author was excessively cautious but in this case it actually compensated for the author also not understanding exactly how Find My Device works, and the two cancelled out and resulted in the correct decisions being made!

In trying to troubleshoot annoying “lost AirPods” notifications without turning off Find My Device, I ended up learning a bit about how the system seems to work.

The way Find My Device works is that there’s a broad class of “child” devices like AirPods that basically only have the ability to say “hello, I’m ” and perhaps the ability to say “help, I’m lost, my name is ” - but crucially they do not have any kind of location data themselves. Then there’s a narrower class of “adult” devices (iPads, iPhones, and Mac) that have location data (GPS on iPads/iPhones, geolocated IP on Macs) and network connectivity. They have the ability to hear any child devices and report “I’m at this location, and I heard a [lost] child with this ID” to the central service, which can then report that information to the parent of that ID. (Incidentally, this let me figure out how to fix my spurious “lost device” notifications - I leave my old MacBook Air on, at my house, connected to wifi, to act as a “stay at home parent” device that can report on child devices, no issues since then.)

If someone trusts the location dot too much and uses it to “find the thief”, there is a possibility they will end up instead accosting the iPhone-bearer who happens to be closest to their device. In the “lost child / responsible adult” analogy, this is sort of an adult reporting they saw a lost child in the museum and being accused of kidnapping the child themselves. (Seeing the same person associated with the device in multiple locations is a much stronger signal, of course.)

These must have been the gen 1 AirPods. The 2nd Gen Pros (maybe others) now have a speaker and makes a pretty loud noise from the case.

The reason she could not track down these AirPods in crowded areas is because the location reported is actually that of any nearby iPhone, and there can be a significant delay sometimes. That explains why they appeared to be in a trash can for some time. They were pinged by someone's iPhone who happened to be at the trash can, and then the AirPods got in a car and moved.

I know of a few folks who have successfully tracked down their stolen items, and it involved knocking on a door or approaching people in less crowded areas where you can be more certain who has them. In all cases, the thief (or unsuspecting buyer of stolen items) just coughs them right up.

This was fun read, and I really don't see why it is such a big deal to try and recover stolen goods. You need to have some street smarts. If the item was lost (versus mugged from you), why not investigate where they could be? Use good judgement. Don't go banging on the door of a dilapidated crack-house. I dont think this is the dangerous mission people make it out to be. There were similar cautions around getting in a car with a stranger (uber, lyft), talking to and meeting internet people (dating apps) etc.