Apple

If You Can Pinpoint My AirPods, Why Can’t You Find My Wife at the Mall?

Seriously Apple, this frosts my beans

All screenshots by author

Thanks to a recent “4A400” firmware update, AirPods Pro now can be found with more precision by the Find Me app. Prior to this update, Find My only knew where the earbuds had last been put back into their case, which meant if you lost them while closed, you didn’t really know much at all.

This updated Find My feature also applies to AirPods Max.

Now Find My tracks these much as it would an AirTag. It’s not quite as accurate because neither the current AirPods Pro nor Max have the U1 chip that AirTags and recent iPhones have, but when Find My said “here” in the photo above, I was literally standing over my AirPods.

Update 11–27–2024: Now that my wife and I both have iPhone 16’s, finding each other in a large store or mall is much easier. The improved performance is probably because of Bluetooth 6.0, newer Ultra-Wideband chips, and tighter hardware integration. Note: don’t try to find your spouses phone; have it find the person.

Getting the update

Getting your pods to update the firmware is a surprisingly obscure procedure. The “procedure”, if it can be called that, is to plug them into…