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 find them. Worst case scenario, a couple of hours of driving.
Using Find My and the directional feature points you in the right direction to within feet, I found them in the tall grass.
The case had been perfectly watertight, and they'd barely lost a percent of power in a week. Remarkable really all round.
That definitely isn’t normal. My guess is you need to clean the contacts in the AirPods. They might be in the case but it’s still pairing or trying to pair. Shouldn’t drain that much, especially overnight.
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.
That is a lot, but I wonder if GP’s only decreased by 1% because their phone wasn’t close by. AirPods and their iPhones probably keep pinging each other to maintain the Bluetooth connection, which must have an effect on the battery.
Mine sometimes don't charge in the case, and can either end up with the case fully charged and the airpods fully drained, or if they charge/discharge through the night with the airpods at a random charge and the case somewhat drained.
I seem to be the only person this happens to, but the won't-charge-in-the-case problem was so bad with my original airpods pro that Apple ended up replacing the case, then the airpods pro and the case, over a very frustrating several months of back and forth. My new airpods pro were fine for maybe eight months, but the problem has started again. So far it's only once every few weeks, which I can live with.
Same here, occasionally I find both the case and the ear pieces with empty batteries while they haven’t been nowhere near empty when I left them, usually previous day or evening.
Something is wrong with them. I can use mine repeatedly over several days before finally needing to plug them in again. You should reach out to support.
I lost two sets in the snow at my mom's house. Where she lives the snow sticks around for 4 or 5 months. They would have been near the top of a few feet of snow where we were making snow angels and generally frolicking, and then covered up by additional snowfall. We found them once it melted. They both work fine.
I accidentally put mine through the washing machine. The aftermarket case I had them in died but the Airpods themselves survived just fine. That was 2 years ago and I still use them every day.
Same here. They sounded "off" for a while, but returned to normal after a day of drying outside of the case. (I'm guessing that perhaps some water was blocking the microphones used for noise cancellation.)
Heh. I wasn’t so lucky, and it was the morning of a flight. Never had more of a reason to pull the forget on the $15 2-hour delivery Apple offers in my area.
Find my is really a killer feature. When AirTags were first released, there was a bunch of media on potential use by stalkers and it seems like Apple hasn’t advertised how airtags (and findmy with devices) work at all since then. Most people think they just work locally until I show them an AirTag halfway around the world that just updated its location.
I bought one for my luggage, and when boarding a train in Paris, I was informed that I left my luggage behind. Went back to grab my luggage, boarded my train and then bought more AirTags at the first opportunity. I’ve used them multiple times to prove my lost luggage is in the airport, countless times to track shipping of high-value goods and countless times to find my keys.
I used to bike from SF to Apple in Cupertino once a week. One week, I dropped my AirPods case on the ride and only when I got to work did I realize I was missing an AirPod. The next week, I stopped right around where I dropped the case and I found it, working just fine.
I love that when you drop the case, the AirPods scatter into the farthest reaches of wherever you are – favorite feature
I saw someone on Twitter that left hers in a seatback on a flight. They'd show up on Find My every day for almost two months before they died. She talked to the airline multiple times about someone checking her seatback and several times they insisted they weren't there. Doubtful they ever checked at all but impressive battery life.
Wow 1 percent in a week. I use mine every couple of days but they drain much faster. Perhaps yours decided, he, see no iPhone for a couple of hours let’s do some deep sleep.
I’d love to have more control over then charge cycle like that.
Slight chance of finding it if you notice it's missing fast enough.
FindMy only finds the charger, not the headphones out of charger, but you can make it play a sound.
You can buy a replacement for about 50% of the price of a new set (complete with charger case).
(in germany) Friend took multiple trains, Ubahn, Bus. 5 Seconds after leaving the bus, he realized he had forgotten his backpack with id, laptop, etc.
We were "hunting" busses for 2h but couldn't find it. He didn't have Find My set up on the mac. Filed police report etc.
A week later he got mail saying the bag was found in a train in Augsburg. Which was the 2nd of 4 legs of the trips or something, and he was completely off where he lost it :D
So you scripted sending the message to 84 different numbers, was that from your own personal iMessage account?
I would be terrified of doing something like that, I imagine the account could get flagged for spam, and hearing the various tech horror stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could end up suspending your iCloud account with everything on it, blacklisting hardware devices linked to it, and who knows what else.
This once happened to somebody I know! Their Apple ID somehow got banned from specifically, and only, iMessage and FaceTime; all other services like iCloud and the app store were working as usual.
No idea why it happened, but Apple support was able to reset it on a phone call.
My theory is that they'd kept a non-active SIM in their phone for a long time, and the phone had tried to repeatedly verify/link that phone number to their Apple ID (via challenge SMS, I believe), thereby exceeding some rate limit.
Gotta love that such rate limits exist and do occasionally hit legitimate users, but at the same time, there are paid lookup-as-a-service APIs out there as mentioned in TFA...
It's been a long while, but I scripted iMessage a bit, and Apple has a pretty casual slide into unworking.
They don't just block your account in one fell swoop, first indicators and messaging will stop working for a few hours. And you can hit that at least a few times without a ban. After a few times of that it was clear it wouldn't be worth running what I had, so I stopped before any sort of permanent banning.
I think more than sending 84 messages, getting reported on handful of them can be more concerning. While you’ll rarely get reported for a party invite.
I'm not the author but my guess is that the API returns whether the number is registered with iMessage or not- like if you type in a number in a new text message it shows whether the message you're sending will be an iMessage or a text message. Don't think the author was spamming random numbers.
iMessage has an AppleScript API that makes it easy. I ran a game in school with something like 50 teams and I had a script to generate different objectives for each team and send them out by text automatically.
I do believe apple’s e2e encryption promises on iMessage content, and don’t think it should interfere with their ability to control for spam / bad actors.
But I also expect them to know the sender/receiver, and I imagine if I click “Delete and Report Junk” button, that I would probably submit the unencrypted contents of that whole conversation to Apple. And they should have also have metrics of total sends vs reported sends.
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 the battery.
I still have the AirTag in FindMy, one day I suppose I'll delete it but I sometimes wonder what happened to it.
Did the person who found it just throw it out? Do recovered AirTags go back to Apple to be recycled and resold? Does the CEO of American Airlines, Robert Isom, have a scrooge-mc-duck-esque pool of lost AirPods he swims around in? Sometimes I wonder.
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 the Apple Store, then about two weeks in Poland and now it’s been in a Dutch warehouse for about three months - last seen 17 hours ago.
I don’t know why it’s spending so much time in a Dutch warehouse - perhaps it’s Apples junkyard in Europe.
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.
They stay with you if you choose. What's kind of sentimental and nice is that the area code stays with you as marker of where you're originally from no matter where you go. It says "this is where I was from as a teenager when I was first allowed a cell phone."
I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.
I remember the happy days when a telephone number (also an email) was a ephemeral, changeable thing. Not a permanent unchanging form of ID.
Alas, if you move out of the country for a period of time, it is a challenge to maintain the host country phone service. So there are no guarantees that you can hold on to that signifier of "this is where I was the last time I wanted to get a new phone subscription".
Same in Netherlands, France and UK as far as I know. Landlines have an area code, mobile numbers are all in a specific range that isn't linked to any location.
First time I got a cell phone in the US I was surprised I had to tell T-mobile my postal code and got a "local" number.
Yup, from NL, have moved everywhere and and changed provider a dozen times and have the same cellphone number since my first phone in 1999 or something.
I grew up in a small town in the US before cell phones were ubiquitous.
When we started getting cell phones, the numbers all had the same first six digits. The last four were assigned in order of provisioning.
My friend and I got our phones at nearly the same time, so our numbers were like 555-555-1004 and 555-555-1008.
This came in handy when I was going to visit him years later, and my phone died on the plane. I didn’t have anyone’s cell number memorized other than my parents (555-555-1013) and his thanks to the numeric similarity. (We kept the same phone numbers when we moved away from home.)
In this town, landline phones also all shared the same first six digits. Before cell phones got into the mix in the late 1990s, people could (and did) use 5 digits to represent phone numbers: 3-XXXX where the 3 referred to the first digit of the “exchange code”. The next town was 8-XXXX, etc.
So the author of the article was lucky it wasn’t someone who moved to Portland. I wonder what the ratio of people who have the area code of their actual location as a phone number is.
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 prefix dedicated to mobile.
When I moved to Ireland I thought it was weird that mobile numbers were identifiable. Especially since I had a Google voice number which looked like a landline which really confused people and websites. "Trust me, just text it. It is fine."
> Do you get a new number if you move
I don't know about the US but this used to be common in Canada. Many providers would consider calls to different cities long distance and charge extra. So if you moved it was "polite" to get a new number so that people could call you for local rates. For example I went to university in Ottawa and changed my Toronto number so that people didn't have to pay long distance to call (even though it is the same province, about a 5h drive).
However this isn't really the case anymore. In the US and mostly in Canada country-wide calling us pretty standard so most people's mobile number will reflect where they grew up, and they will carry that around for the rest of their lives.
> and then change to a different provider?
Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.
> Canada. It isn't possible to distinguish landlines from cell phones by looking at the number.
Atlantic Canada is small enough that there was a single area code for Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia up until a few years ago.
Cellphones in the region tend to have their own CO code (first three digits of the phone number), so you can usually infer if it’s a number you can text or not.
This is also the case for different regions of NS and PEI, so seeing a 902 number where the CO number is different from what you’re used to makes it seem “exotic”. This was also handy back in the day to know whether it was long distance or not.
This is slowly eroding as numbers get ported out, and landlines get disconnected.
> Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.
There's a way around this that I've done a few times. You port the number to VOIP (I use voip.ms) and then you set up that number to forward to whatever the new number you get given. Dialing out you still get your new number, but people dialing you can use the old number.
This was super handy when I had to move my mom from a retirement home in one city to another city a province away.
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?
Area Code 810 is the Thumb of Michigan, including some of central Michigan, so it's not all 8XX. Unsure how they draw the line, but 800 and 888 are the two that I see businesses use for toll free calling.
> 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.
> Why would moving require a new provider/number? Are plans/numbers not portable in Europe?
They are portable in Europe (I said that in the second part of my comment), but it seemed like they weren’t in the US, because otherwise, the post is a bit strange. The author just tried every number from his area code to find the owner, when it is possible/likely that the owner has a completely different area code. That’s why I thought it might be that the current number always reflects the actual area code.
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.
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.
In the UK cell numbers start with 07 and landline numbers start with 01. And there is no region encoded in a cell number, but landline numbers begin with an area code.
In the olden days, if your cell number had a different area code from the place you were physically in, you'd get long-distance charges when calling a local number, but not when calling a number matching your area code.
In modern times however, the area code is largely irrelevant. You get assigned a number with the area code of the place you first opened your account, and then you can just keep that number forever if you want. I've had the same number for almost 20 years and I've had four different providers in that time. Porting a number between carriers has been a standardized process for a very long time.
There's also some social signaling here, like 415 is the original San Francisco area code – but if you got a number in the last few years it might be 628 which was added as 415 reached capacity.
This social signal predates cell phones. There was a bit about it in an episode of Seinfeld, “The Maid” (1998)
> The episode also featured the New York area code 646. When the 212 area code ran out of numbers, 646 was created. Elaine gets a new number with the 646 area code. She is not happy with the new number because she believes the area code makes it too long to dial. She is proved correct when attempting to give her number to a man in the park. Initially eager, he reads the number, asks if it is in New Jersey. Her response is, "No, it's just like 212 except they multiplied every number by 3…and added 1 to the middle number." He says he is already in a relationship and walks off.
Yeah some people put a lot of value on area codes. My wife was so proud when she got her first iPhone years ago because it was a 214 number (Dallas proper). There use to be posters around town saying “keep 972 out of 214” since 972 was associated with the smaller suburban areas just North of Dallas. I had an 817 number which was ft worth and basically an untouchable haha.
Was going to post the same thing. People forget that prior to cell phone number portability between carriers in late 2003, you basically got a new phone number when you moved or changed carriers. Hence much more of the “new phone, who dis?”
Now the comic is more like “where you lived in 2005 or when you first got a cell phone”.
Now that I have kids it’s an interesting signaling mechanism seeing which parents have local area codes and which ones have them from other parts of the country.
I have some distant family who moved from California to Idaho as part of a wider Conservative exodus. Some Idahoans aren't too keen, they see Californians as migrants who are driving up house prices etc. I don't believe there's any sense of irony on either side.
Anyway, they had to get new cellphone numbers because they'd get awful/no customer service if, say, they dropped their truck off for repairs and left a California number.
You can keep your number if you move. My number is from another state.
Also nowadays when you get a new line you can pick any area code, so they have become somewhat meaningless.
I wouldn't go that far. Area codes don't mean as much as they used to, but they are still a very strong association to the actual area. I would say that the majority of people I interact with in my area have a mobile number from the area code. And of those who don't, all of them are from out of state.
On a recent holiday I'd just checked in to my hotel, went to unpack a bit and couldn't find my AirPods.
I went to look at Find My to see where they were, but unfortunately I was in South Korea, and little did I know the location function in Find My doesn't work there.
I thought it must have fallen out of my pocket while I was in the taxi, as I remembered having them as I got off the plane, and I have a bit of history with my earphones falling out of my pockets.
I took a taxi from the taxi rank at the airport, so there was no record of who drove me like with Uber, but luckily I paid by card, and I could see what taxi company I used.
I asked the staff at the hotel if they could help me call the taxi company to see if they could find out which driver dropped me off. They somehow managed to contact the driver, but he had not seen my AirPods.
I went about the rest of my day while trying to convince myself that I didn't need a new pair. But while the location doesn't work with Find My, I could still play a sound through the case. So I would randomly hit it a few times hoping it was actually hidden away in my things.
After losing all hope, later when I returned to my hotel room I found a note had been left for me saying the taxi driver had found my AirPods and turned them in to a local police station!
Feeling excited I wouldn't have to go on the rest of my holiday without earphones, I happily made an hour long trip across the city to collect my AirPods, arriving just as the station was closing.
I found some AirPods on a remote trail awhile back, case and all. Batteries were completely dead. Once charged they paired to my iphone with no indication of a previous owner, besides the device name of John’s AirPods or whatever.
I tried briefly (not as hard as the author) to figure out who they belonged to but had no luck.
I called Apple support and gave the serial number, but they told me there wasn’t anything they could do if the owner did not mark them as lost via the Bluetooth settings page. Even though at that point Apple presumably had all the information necessary to contact the original owner…
So I cleaned the AirPods and have been using them since. Is there any way for me to find the owner if I have no info about the owners area code like the author did?
AirPods are a bit pricey but cheap enough that I wouldn’t even bother reporting them lost to the local park authority. I doubt there’s much you can do besides a sign at the trailheads.
I guess Apple didn’t bother to connect with the original owner since lot many people do not buy for themselves and as gifts or for parents. So unless AirPods were paired with a device, Apple wouldn’t like to get involved much.
They're also impossible to register without an iOS device. I have a pair that I won, but have no iPhone or iPad. They work great with my Macs, and pretty well with Android, but there is no way for me to register them with Find My, which is pretty annoying. There's no logical reason they couldn't do this on a Mac.
They don’t get involved even if you find an iphone that has John doe still logged on. No clue why they wouldn’t at least send an email to the account owner. I tried to surrender the iphone at the store but they wouldn’t take it.
I mean, even if Apple knows the address of the people who bought it, it might have been re-sold since then - so it makes sense they don’t give out any info.
Random late night story, my iPhone was lifted while being unattended. Using findmy, I was able to circle in on an apartment complex.
After bugging the police for weeks, they finally met with me to look at my evidence. We met directly outside of the apartment. They didn’t leave their SUV.
A week later I got the phone back , because you can place a message on the lock screen remotely. The janitor of the apartment called me because I offered ( and paid ) a 100 dollar reward and a number they could reach me at.
Not sure if there is a lesson here, except the feature of remotely changing a Lock Screen message is a great feature.
Huh. Where I am, janitor is used exclusively for more of an overall maintenance person of the entire building. And in such scenarios, due to rental laws, the janitor cannot enter an apartment without prior notice... unless of course it is an emergency.
(An emergency has to be a real emergency, not "it's urgent to the landlord")
So why I find this weird is, did the thief just leave a stolen phone, charged, in their apartment laying around for anyone to see? And if so, how would the janitor even see the lockscreen, wouldn't they have to hit the power button to see it (I presume the screen is off by default?). And why was the janitor even in the apartment? And presumably without the thief in their apartment?
And worse, why would the janitor effectively steal a phone from a tenant, and go outside and sell it to you for $100, just because there was a message on the lockscreen. How did the janitor know you didn't somehow hack the owner's phone, and you were the thief?
NOTE: I'm sure the story is true, but I'm curious if it's just a stupid thief, or.. what.
Whatever I'm not understanding, good job on getting your phone back.
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.
I forgot my iPhone in a taxi in China; managed to call it and talk to the driver who had found it. Had to pay him off to get it back though :/ But it was cheaper than buying a new phone.
Alright, so I have a project that is mostly abandoned right now due to various other obligations.
The main goal was to contact car owners without having to have their phone numbers and such. But i quickly saw the advantage of tagging all sort of things. So I have it on my keychain, wallet, or several other things I own. If I lose these items, any stranger can contact me without having any of my personal contacts.
What is it? It's a QR code. You scan it, and you can send some prewritten notifications to the owner. Once they reply, you can have a conversation. Scanning captures the gps location both for security measures and to help recover it.
This seems brilliant.
No batteries to fail, etc. No tracking, no databases, simple. True hacker solution.
I assume we can print our own bar code on paper, and using clear tape, attach it to most things.
Yep, you can print it out. My goal was to provide the printing. You can purchase a bundle of QRs stickers, or print it for free. Next year I'll do a show hn.
You can chat through the dashboard. Email only. Basically, the finder scans it, sends a message. The owner gets a notification through the app, or email, replies. The scanner can create an account to chat. No personal info is exchanged, unless they decide to do so via chat.
Long time ago I came across very similar concept in use in India. Not much, but visible usage. I also came to know by looking at a sticker on car windshield.
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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 find them. Worst case scenario, a couple of hours of driving.
Using Find My and the directional feature points you in the right direction to within feet, I found them in the tall grass.
The case had been perfectly watertight, and they'd barely lost a percent of power in a week. Remarkable really all round.
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.
I seem to be the only person this happens to, but the won't-charge-in-the-case problem was so bad with my original airpods pro that Apple ended up replacing the case, then the airpods pro and the case, over a very frustrating several months of back and forth. My new airpods pro were fine for maybe eight months, but the problem has started again. So far it's only once every few weeks, which I can live with.
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I did not and will not complain. I have owned over a hundred pairs of headphones/earbuds in my lifetime and these things are the best, by FAR.
However, don’t wash them.
Maybe it was because it was quite a lengthy washing cycle?
I bought one for my luggage, and when boarding a train in Paris, I was informed that I left my luggage behind. Went back to grab my luggage, boarded my train and then bought more AirTags at the first opportunity. I’ve used them multiple times to prove my lost luggage is in the airport, countless times to track shipping of high-value goods and countless times to find my keys.
I love that when you drop the case, the AirPods scatter into the farthest reaches of wherever you are – favorite feature
I’d love to have more control over then charge cycle like that.
You can buy a replacement for about 50% of the price of a new set (complete with charger case).
We were "hunting" busses for 2h but couldn't find it. He didn't have Find My set up on the mac. Filed police report etc. A week later he got mail saying the bag was found in a train in Augsburg. Which was the 2nd of 4 legs of the trips or something, and he was completely off where he lost it :D
I would be terrified of doing something like that, I imagine the account could get flagged for spam, and hearing the various tech horror stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could end up suspending your iCloud account with everything on it, blacklisting hardware devices linked to it, and who knows what else.
No idea why it happened, but Apple support was able to reset it on a phone call.
My theory is that they'd kept a non-active SIM in their phone for a long time, and the phone had tried to repeatedly verify/link that phone number to their Apple ID (via challenge SMS, I believe), thereby exceeding some rate limit.
Gotta love that such rate limits exist and do occasionally hit legitimate users, but at the same time, there are paid lookup-as-a-service APIs out there as mentioned in TFA...
Google should take note.
They don't just block your account in one fell swoop, first indicators and messaging will stop working for a few hours. And you can hit that at least a few times without a ban. After a few times of that it was clear it wouldn't be worth running what I had, so I stopped before any sort of permanent banning.
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But I also expect them to know the sender/receiver, and I imagine if I click “Delete and Report Junk” button, that I would probably submit the unencrypted contents of that whole conversation to Apple. And they should have also have metrics of total sends vs reported sends.
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 the battery.
I still have the AirTag in FindMy, one day I suppose I'll delete it but I sometimes wonder what happened to it.
Did the person who found it just throw it out? Do recovered AirTags go back to Apple to be recycled and resold? Does the CEO of American Airlines, Robert Isom, have a scrooge-mc-duck-esque pool of lost AirPods he swims around in? Sometimes I wonder.
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 the Apple Store, then about two weeks in Poland and now it’s been in a Dutch warehouse for about three months - last seen 17 hours ago.
I don’t know why it’s spending so much time in a Dutch warehouse - perhaps it’s Apples junkyard in Europe.
My lost tag is (presumably) attached to my keys at the bottom of a lake. I refuse to delete it from findmy.
But, it was attached to the handles with one of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B34Y5YZS
There are people who dive down and find lost stuff on the bottom of lakes, and people who go magnet fishing, they still might find your keys!
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.
I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.
Alas, if you move out of the country for a period of time, it is a challenge to maintain the host country phone service. So there are no guarantees that you can hold on to that signifier of "this is where I was the last time I wanted to get a new phone subscription".
So the tattoo might be the better choice.
First time I got a cell phone in the US I was surprised I had to tell T-mobile my postal code and got a "local" number.
When we started getting cell phones, the numbers all had the same first six digits. The last four were assigned in order of provisioning.
My friend and I got our phones at nearly the same time, so our numbers were like 555-555-1004 and 555-555-1008.
This came in handy when I was going to visit him years later, and my phone died on the plane. I didn’t have anyone’s cell number memorized other than my parents (555-555-1013) and his thanks to the numeric similarity. (We kept the same phone numbers when we moved away from home.)
In this town, landline phones also all shared the same first six digits. Before cell phones got into the mix in the late 1990s, people could (and did) use 5 digits to represent phone numbers: 3-XXXX where the 3 referred to the first digit of the “exchange code”. The next town was 8-XXXX, etc.
I have no idea if he was given an option but our numbers were sequential. X, X+1, and X+2.
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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 prefix dedicated to mobile.
When I moved to Ireland I thought it was weird that mobile numbers were identifiable. Especially since I had a Google voice number which looked like a landline which really confused people and websites. "Trust me, just text it. It is fine."
> Do you get a new number if you move
I don't know about the US but this used to be common in Canada. Many providers would consider calls to different cities long distance and charge extra. So if you moved it was "polite" to get a new number so that people could call you for local rates. For example I went to university in Ottawa and changed my Toronto number so that people didn't have to pay long distance to call (even though it is the same province, about a 5h drive).
However this isn't really the case anymore. In the US and mostly in Canada country-wide calling us pretty standard so most people's mobile number will reflect where they grew up, and they will carry that around for the rest of their lives.
> and then change to a different provider?
Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.
Atlantic Canada is small enough that there was a single area code for Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia up until a few years ago.
Cellphones in the region tend to have their own CO code (first three digits of the phone number), so you can usually infer if it’s a number you can text or not.
This is also the case for different regions of NS and PEI, so seeing a 902 number where the CO number is different from what you’re used to makes it seem “exotic”. This was also handy back in the day to know whether it was long distance or not.
This is slowly eroding as numbers get ported out, and landlines get disconnected.
There's a way around this that I've done a few times. You port the number to VOIP (I use voip.ms) and then you set up that number to forward to whatever the new number you get given. Dialing out you still get your new number, but people dialing you can use the old number.
This was super handy when I had to move my mom from a retirement home in one city to another city a province away.
Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?
Same in Poland.
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.
They are portable in Europe (I said that in the second part of my comment), but it seemed like they weren’t in the US, because otherwise, the post is a bit strange. The author just tried every number from his area code to find the owner, when it is possible/likely that the owner has a completely different area code. That’s why I thought it might be that the current number always reflects the actual area code.
In modern times however, the area code is largely irrelevant. You get assigned a number with the area code of the place you first opened your account, and then you can just keep that number forever if you want. I've had the same number for almost 20 years and I've had four different providers in that time. Porting a number between carriers has been a standardized process for a very long time.
Not sure how it’s done. Maybe there’s a code system.
Also for the biggest service provider, it always displays Ahmedabad as the city for some reason.
> The episode also featured the New York area code 646. When the 212 area code ran out of numbers, 646 was created. Elaine gets a new number with the 646 area code. She is not happy with the new number because she believes the area code makes it too long to dial. She is proved correct when attempting to give her number to a man in the park. Initially eager, he reads the number, asks if it is in New Jersey. Her response is, "No, it's just like 212 except they multiplied every number by 3…and added 1 to the middle number." He says he is already in a relationship and walks off.
Now the comic is more like “where you lived in 2005 or when you first got a cell phone”.
Now that I have kids it’s an interesting signaling mechanism seeing which parents have local area codes and which ones have them from other parts of the country.
Anyway, they had to get new cellphone numbers because they'd get awful/no customer service if, say, they dropped their truck off for repairs and left a California number.
I went to look at Find My to see where they were, but unfortunately I was in South Korea, and little did I know the location function in Find My doesn't work there.
I thought it must have fallen out of my pocket while I was in the taxi, as I remembered having them as I got off the plane, and I have a bit of history with my earphones falling out of my pockets.
I took a taxi from the taxi rank at the airport, so there was no record of who drove me like with Uber, but luckily I paid by card, and I could see what taxi company I used.
I asked the staff at the hotel if they could help me call the taxi company to see if they could find out which driver dropped me off. They somehow managed to contact the driver, but he had not seen my AirPods.
I went about the rest of my day while trying to convince myself that I didn't need a new pair. But while the location doesn't work with Find My, I could still play a sound through the case. So I would randomly hit it a few times hoping it was actually hidden away in my things.
After losing all hope, later when I returned to my hotel room I found a note had been left for me saying the taxi driver had found my AirPods and turned them in to a local police station!
Feeling excited I wouldn't have to go on the rest of my holiday without earphones, I happily made an hour long trip across the city to collect my AirPods, arriving just as the station was closing.
I tried briefly (not as hard as the author) to figure out who they belonged to but had no luck.
I called Apple support and gave the serial number, but they told me there wasn’t anything they could do if the owner did not mark them as lost via the Bluetooth settings page. Even though at that point Apple presumably had all the information necessary to contact the original owner…
So I cleaned the AirPods and have been using them since. Is there any way for me to find the owner if I have no info about the owners area code like the author did?
After bugging the police for weeks, they finally met with me to look at my evidence. We met directly outside of the apartment. They didn’t leave their SUV.
A week later I got the phone back , because you can place a message on the lock screen remotely. The janitor of the apartment called me because I offered ( and paid ) a 100 dollar reward and a number they could reach me at.
Not sure if there is a lesson here, except the feature of remotely changing a Lock Screen message is a great feature.
(An emergency has to be a real emergency, not "it's urgent to the landlord")
So why I find this weird is, did the thief just leave a stolen phone, charged, in their apartment laying around for anyone to see? And if so, how would the janitor even see the lockscreen, wouldn't they have to hit the power button to see it (I presume the screen is off by default?). And why was the janitor even in the apartment? And presumably without the thief in their apartment?
And worse, why would the janitor effectively steal a phone from a tenant, and go outside and sell it to you for $100, just because there was a message on the lockscreen. How did the janitor know you didn't somehow hack the owner's phone, and you were the thief?
NOTE: I'm sure the story is true, but I'm curious if it's just a stupid thief, or.. what.
Whatever I'm not understanding, good job on getting your phone back.
$100 to guarantee your device back is a small price to pay apart from the insult of paying the thief.
The main goal was to contact car owners without having to have their phone numbers and such. But i quickly saw the advantage of tagging all sort of things. So I have it on my keychain, wallet, or several other things I own. If I lose these items, any stranger can contact me without having any of my personal contacts.
What is it? It's a QR code. You scan it, and you can send some prewritten notifications to the owner. Once they reply, you can have a conversation. Scanning captures the gps location both for security measures and to help recover it.
https://web.ottomon.net/join
Landing page is totally misleading, I had big plans, but changing diapers took priority.
https://www.bitrip.com/shop
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Long time ago I came across very similar concept in use in India. Not much, but visible usage. I also came to know by looking at a sticker on car windshield.