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Did you lose your AirPods?

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Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#271

Post by RamblingCTO »

alistairSH wrote: post #262
echoangle wrote: post #191

TIL American cellphone numbers use an area code that represents the actual location. Do you get a new number if you move and then change to a different provider? 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.

Why would moving require a new provider/number? Are plans/numbers not portable in Europe? 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.

But that's exactly what they are saying. Numbers are just ported over to a different provider, so there's literally no certainty you can even pinpoint the provider they are using from a number. The prefix belonged to a provider, but you can move numbers as you move providers.

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#272

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

kevincox wrote: post #246
echoangle wrote: post #191

TIL American cellphone numbers use an area code that represents the actual location. Do you get a new number if you move and then change to a different provider? 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.

This is the same in Canada. It isn't possible to distinguish landlines from cell phones by looking at the number. All numbers issued in an area have the same area code. 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 pre…

Practically forcing people to change mobile phone numbers when moving from one place to another is a level of evil I didn't not expect to exist in Canada.

Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#273

Post by theoreticalmal »

firtoz wrote: post #251
Towaway69 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first paired AirTag was somehow removed from my findNow list when I paired my phone with my MacBook (I suspect it had something to do with encryption). 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…

Some naughty folk could do this trick to identify worthy treasure to plunder

Wow, could you imagine? A warehouse full of maybe-broken Apple products. What a fun place to check out!!

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#274

Post by theoreticalmal »

ancientorange wrote: post #159
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #145

I lost a pair of AirTags on an international flight (in cargo), fortunately I only lost the AirTags, and not the actual bags they were attached to! 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…

Why not put the airtag inside the bag? My lost tag is (presumably) attached to my keys at the bottom of a lake. I refuse to delete it from findmy.

Kindred spirit! My old Apple Watch is at the bottom of the Colorado River near Moab. Still paired in Find My.

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#275

Post by foundddit »

hilux wrote: post #77
helipad wrote: post #69

I left my AirPods Pro at a school sports field an hour away, and I didn't realize until the next morning after it been raining heavily. I gave them up for lost and needed headphones for work – so ordered some from Apple with same day delivery. 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…

Mine lose 20-30% sitting in their case overnight. It's very annoying. You ARE lucky!

Just chiming in to say I had the same problem and found a solution.

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.

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#276

Post by seabass-labrax »

userbinator wrote: post #199
seabass-labrax wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I can one-up you again! For $249, I can get over fifty pairs of the Xiaomi J18 bluetooth earphones. Quite apart from the mind-boggling economies of scale with modern electronics, I can genuinely recommend these. They haven't particularly good audio quality compared to over-ear headphones, but they are still remarkably good for in-ear headphones.

I just looked these up, and for sub-$5 you get two earphones containing a driver, wireless IC, battery, and a charging case with its own circuitry and battery. And presumably they're still making a profit on that. I don't expect they'll be tuned to sound better than the wired equivalents which are closer to $1, but the fact that they can even make a working product of that complexity at that price point is mind-boggl…

Indeed - there's of course still plenty of exploitation in the world market that puts a damper on the awe for me, but it's starting to feel like science fiction such as Star Trek is becoming reality ahead of schedule. At this moment, I have around fifty distinct objects near me, each with at least one pin-prick-sized computer inside them, and I could probably purchase all of them again with no more than a days wage.

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!

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#277

Post by sethammons »

flumpcakes wrote: post #244
globular-toast wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You paid the thief?

If the police can't help you this is the best you can do. I know lots of stories of people getting back their $1000+ gear only when they offer cash for the person to drop it and walk away or to anonymously return it. $100 to guarantee your device back is a small price to pay apart from the insult of paying the thief.

A former boss had the idea of fence.io - a digital stolen goods fence service allowing thieves to anonymously sell back goods to their original owners.

It was a joke... mostly

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#279

Post by kevincox »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #272
kevincox wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same in Canada. It isn't possible to distinguish landlines from cell phones by looking at the number. All numbers issued in an area have the same area code. 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 pre…

Practically forcing people to change mobile phone numbers when moving from one place to another is a level of evil I didn't not expect to exist in Canada. Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?

You'd probably have to ask someone who worked in the phone industry at the time. I suspect that long-distance calls were legitimately quite expensive to provide at some point in the past, and the industry was happy to keep charging extra even as they reduced internal costs.

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.

Re: Did you lose your AirPods?

#280

Post by alexanderdmitri »

alistairSH wrote: post #262
echoangle wrote: post #191

TIL American cellphone numbers use an area code that represents the actual location. Do you get a new number if you move and then change to a different provider? 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.

Why would moving require a new provider/number? Are plans/numbers not portable in Europe? 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.

When I first got my plan / phone on the US east coast I was given the option to pick a number from anywhere in the country. I went with a fulsom county CA number and its come in really handy. I know to screen incoming calls that have the fulsom area code (always spam) and numbers that have the local area code where I live are actually legit.
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