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AirPods Find My Network Support Includes Tethering to Apple ID and New Manual Unpairing Process
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The best new Find My feature for the AirPods Pros was mentioned at the last Apple WWDC event,
"With iOS 15, you can locate your AirPods Pro and AirPods Max using the Find My network. Your AirPods simply send out a secure Bluetooth beacon that can be detected by other Apple devices. They can relay your AirPods' location to the network and then back to your Find My app. And if they're nearby, just choose Play Sound. Listen for the chirp, whether they're in their case or out."
"With iOS 15, you can locate your AirPods Pro and AirPods Max using the Find My network. Your AirPods simply send out a secure Bluetooth beacon that can be detected by other Apple devices. They can relay your AirPods' location to the network and then back to your Find My app. And if they're nearby, just choose Play Sound. Listen for the chirp, whether they're in their case or out."
I strongly suspect that won't be the case — it would be a ridiculous omission if it were.
Right now, if you reset an AirTag, or other Find My Network device like a Chipolo ONE Spot, it still remains tethered to the original owner's Apple ID unless they remove it from their Find My app. Much the same way Activation Lock works on an iPhone.
Apple calls this "Pairing Lock" and if it's already thought of this for a $29 AirTag, I can't believe that the $249 AirPods Pro and $549 AirPods Max wouldn't work in the same manner.
The fact that it's not "Activation Lock" suggests that anybody finding your AirPods could still use them with their own iPhone or other Bluetooth device, but they wouldn't be able to disassociate them from the Find My Network, so you'd still be able to track them down.
Well I sure hope so! I guess this is one of those things we'll have to see in real life to find the 'small' things like this out. But the article's wording suggest there is no failsafe:
The 9to5Mac report seems to say the same too.
Yeah, but to be fair the only evidence so far of how this works is code strings found within the latest iOS 15 beta. Similar bits and pieces found in the iOS 14.3 betas months ago gave us a similarly incomplete look at how AirTags would ultimately work.
To me it's pretty unfathomable that Belkin's Soundform earbuds would be more theft-proof that Apple's own AirPods. Then again, it also surprises me that Apple took as long as it did to add this to AirPods in the first place. Although maybe that was just a matter of getting what looks to be a unique semi-precision finding feature over Bluetooth working properly.
I can't help but wonder why the unpairing is not done just from the AppleID website or from Settings on an iPhone/iPad/Mac. It would be simple and if the AirPods are lost or stolen, they would be useless.Wow, such convoluted way, but I guess so that a random person won't be able to just unpair your Airpods easily.
Still, now thieves would know how to do it as well...
What is the benefit of unpairing from the AirPods? 🤔
Hmmm, this makes me wonder if a malicious significant other could unpair the APPs from their phone, "gift" them to their unsuspecting partner, and use it to track them with them being none the wiser. Seems to be a glaring oversight on Apple's part.
In this scenario, if possible, I wonder if the AirPods could do a thing like the AirTags and beep every so often or even a Siri announcement through the APPs that they're synced to another Find My account?
If this will work anything like AirTags and other Find My Network devices — and I'd be very surprised if it didn't — the reset is only for those scenarios where the item is no longer in your possession.
See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210982 for how it works with AirTags.
When you remove an AirTag from the Find My app while it's nearby, your iPhone or iPad will deactivate the Pairing Lock directly over Bluetooth. For whatever reason, however, this can't be done remotely. I guess the Find My Network doesn't pass these commands via other people's iPhones, and an AirTag that has the Pairing Lock activated on it won't talk directly to another iPhone until it's reset — at which point it would still check with Apple's servers and refuse to pair with your iPhone if it's already assigned to another Apple ID.
I strongly suspect this will be the case. Apple already does this for every other Find My Network device — while the beeping is obviously specific to AirTags, the iPhone notifications that let you know an unknown device has been travelling with you is a feature of the Find My app. It works with any device on the Find My Network, whether that's AirTags, Chipolo's ONE Spot, Belkin's Soundform earbuds, or even VanMoof's e-bike (although it would be hard to miss an unknown bicycle travelling with you 😏).
There's no reason to believe that AirPods Pro and AirPods Max would work any differently in this regard, since it looks like Apple is effectively adding them to the Find My Network here — effectively treating them like they have a built-in AirTag.
Apple's own IOS 15 page references it.
I have not seen it in IOS 15 yet but I believe it needs a FW update
