3 simple AirPods tricks

Including how to find a lost one.

Author

Leander Kahney
August 17, 2023

I lost one of my AirPods the other day while riding my bike around San Francisco.

I didn’t notice immediately because I was flying downhill and couldn’t hear that the music had stopped over the wind noise.

Once I discovered it was missing, the first thing I did was check Find My, which can track down individual AirPods and/or their case.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t synced with my AirPods for a few days, and the last known location of the missing earbud was back at my house.

Dejected, I decided to retrace my steps. I figured that even though this is San Francisco, where anything left on the street gets snapped up instantly, people might not be tempted by a single, ear-wax-encrusted AirPod.

Huffing back up the hill, I didn’t see anything and was about to give up when the other AirPod, still in my ear, made that distinctive sound you hear when AirPods first connect with your device.

Success! I knew it had to be close. But scanning the ground, I couldn’t immediately see the missing AirPod. What the heck!

Then it dawned on me that some Good Samaritan might have seen it on the ground and put it in a safe place for the rightful owner (me) to retrieve.

And there it was — about 20 feet away, sitting atop a low wall. Thank you, kind stranger!

And the moral of the story?

There isn’t one, except perhaps that the best way to listen to music on a bike is with the AirPods Pro 2 in Transparency mode. It’s freaky good at picking up external sounds. And, thanks to AI, sometimes it’s like having a pair of Spider-Man super ears. Assuming you can keep ’em in your earholes.

Oh, and this is all a plug for today’s top post: 3 simple AirPods tricks you might not know, including using Find My to track lost ones.

And if you’re tempted by the latest AirPods Pro 2, Amazon is running a pretty good $50 off sale right now.

Also in today’s newsletter:

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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One more thing ...

❝

Apple stores represent a strategy that said: We're not just going to sell products. We're going to help our customers using Windows — which is sort of an inferior product — move up to a Mac, and we're gonna show them how much better it is. And that worked.

— Steve Jobs, 2006.

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Have you used Find My to locate missing AirPods?

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