iOS 15 Lets You Track Your Lost AirPods Pro (And Here’s How)

The AirPods are great, but also very small, making them easy to lose. Fortunately, iOS 15 makes it easy to track them down – even if you’re out of Bluetooth range. This is how the AirPods search in iOS 15 works.

iOS 15: Find AirPods

Now you can already enable your iPhone’s Find My app to locate a lost AirPod, but this will only work if you’re within Bluetooth range of your AirPods. This is about ten meters. If you’re outside, the Find My app only shows the last known location.

iOS 15 makes it possible to always track the location of your AirPods – even if they are miles away. Apple does this by adding the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max to the Find My network. Unfortunately, the function is not there for the regular AirPods.

The Find My network consists of all Apple devices worldwide: there are hundreds of millions of them. Using the Bluetooth signal from your lost AirPods, nearby iPhones, iPads, and Macs will relay the location of your earbuds. This is done completely anonymously. This way you can see exactly where your AirPods are. You do this by opening the Find My app and tapping your AirPods in the “Devices” tab.

Link with Apple ID

To enable the function, the AirPods will soon be linked to your Apple ID. Discovered this 9to5Mac based on iOS 15 internal code. Interestingly, lost AirPods continue to send their location to the owner even if someone else connects them to another Apple device.

It also makes it easier to find the AirPods when you’re nearby but don’t know exactly where the earbuds are. For this, the AirPods use ‘Precision finding’, a Bluetooth technology that is already present in the AirTag. The AirTag is Apple’s new tracker to locate valuable assets.

9to5Mac does note that the AirPods don’t have an activation lock like other Apple devices. This means that a finder can still reset the AirPods quite easily, after which the location can no longer be traced.

More new features

With iOS 15 (which is likely to be released in September), Apple will bring more innovations to the AirPods. You can read what those are in the following article:

Also read: These 5 new features bring iOS 15 to your AirPods