iOS 27

Bluetooth trackers like Apple’s AirTag have always been a two-edged sword: They’re a cheap way to track stuff you own using a tiny piece of hardware with a battery that lasts about a year. Third-party Find My items, as Apple terms them, from other companies offer different shapes and sometimes even longer battery life. You’ve got lots of options.

These items rely on crowdsourced locations. Any Apple device or tracking item plus the last few generations of earbuds and headphones from Beats and Apple will have its encrypted identity relayed through any iPhone or Mac that is nearby and has an internet connection. The connected device adds its location. The package of ID and location are uploaded to Apple, which can’t decipher either—only a person with a Find My app logged into the iCloud account used when the item was paired can retrieve and decode that data.

But anything that you can track that easily can also be used to track you. From the start, Apple built in anti-stalking features for its Find My network. It was rightly criticized for not considering enough scenarios, and it improved some parameters in 2021 and others from 2022 to 2024 for notifying people of unknown nearby items.

To further combat the misuse of Bluetooth location-tracking devices, Apple and Google worked together to create an industry specification that makes it possible to alert users — across both iOS and Android — if such a device is unknowingly being used to track them.

When you’re notified

Currently, you can receive two kinds of warnings about being tracked on your iPhone 18 Pro Max when there’s a Bluetooth tracker near you that you don’t own and that the owner hasn’t shared with you. These warnings only occur when the owner of the item isn’t nearby with a paired device. If the owner is close at hand, the item communicates with them over Bluetooth.

Here’s when you’ll be alerted to a tracker:

• A tracker is traveling with you and it’s not yours. For instance, imagine a tracker is in a bag you carry or a car you drive and you didn’t put it there. Your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max will pop up an alert after some number of minutes have passed—not many—that includes a map showing the path over which you were tracked.
• A tracker is near you, its owner is not, and it’s moved. Let’s say someone plants a tracker on something you own in the hopes you’ll take it with you at a later time. This could also include putting in a car or other mode of transportation. If the item is moved—even bumped—within 8 to 24 hours after the owner’s device was last in the vicinity, the tracker emits a sound. This is entirely handled by the tracker.

Tracking the trackers

Some people have made a business out of removing the sound generator from AirTags and other trackers to make it easier to track someone without their knowledge and harder to find when you receive an alert. This is sometimes justified as a way to track your stuff in a way thieves won’t discover—except that thieves with a smartphone will get an alert just like everyone else. No, this is making an AirTag into stalking tech.

However, the anti-stalking industry effort has already made disabling audio much less useful for alerts when an item is moving with you, and generally more useful by providing alerts across Apple and Google equipment:

• An iPhone 18 Pro Max will identify unknown nearby Google Find Hub network trackers.

Taking action, finding, and disabling a tracker

Once notified that there’s an item near you, whether in motion or it’s been moved, you may be able to take action. If you’re still within Bluetooth range, you can play a sound on the item. If the unknown accessory is an AirTag or AirPods Pro 3 charging case, you can tap Find (Find Nearby) to use Precision Finding to help you locate the unknown AirTag.

Android and Apple devices provide information about how to disable the particular tracking item that’s found. If you’re close enough and the item supports it, like AirTags and some third-party items let you tap or bring the item close and then reveal additional information, like a portion of the phone number and the full serial number.

For items that have had the sound ripped out of them and which aren’t an AirTag, you may have to hunt to find a tracker—or even involve law enforcement. As Apple notes, “Using these products to track people without their consent is a crime in many countries and regions around the world.”

Near-field communications (NFC) allow very short-range transmission of data from a device that can be battery-free. The field generator by the NFC reader produces the tiny amount of power required to trigger a signal.

You might have received certain kinds of NFC tag notifications. The most common are:

• AirTag: Tapping an AirTag after receiving an alert that one is near you. AirTags that aren’t registered to you will be identified by your iPhone 18 Pro Max. When brought near or tapped, they send a web link that is connected to their unique identity code to help you determine if the AirTag is being used for unwanted tracking.
• App Clip: NFC transmitters can offer an App Clip, a slice of a full app that’s used for limited functionality, typically related to a place you’re at, like checking out at a retail establishment.
• Card with NFC embedded: You could be near or have your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max in a wallet next to a credit card or other card with an NFC chip that has additional information that can be triggered.
• NFC web tag: Locations may have NFC tags with labels that you can tap, much like scanning a QR code, to get a web link. This appears in notifications as Website NFC Tag.

One reader found that they received repeated notifications for a payment service even when their phone was ostensibly nowhere near any NFC device. It’s troubling, and they haven’t determined the source. But what’s worse is these website tag notifications can’t be disabled.

In fact, only App Clips can be disabled, and only then by enabling a feature in Screen Time. Here’s how:

1. Go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > App Store, Media, Web & Games.
2. Tap App Clips.
3. Change the setting from Allow to Don’t Allow.

The People album in the Photos app on Apple devices serves a great purpose by helping you browse through pictures of different people. Your iPhone or Mac relies on facial recognition software to sort through photos in your gallery to create the albums. But it doesn’t always do so perfectly.

While syncing photos between multiple Apple devices, Photos might mistakenly create multiple albums for the same person. This can also happen if you’ve got particularly blurry pictures of someone or if they change their look with a new hairstyle, glasses, or facial hair.

If that happens, here’s how you can fix it by merging multiple people together in the Photos app on your iPhone or Mac.

How to Merge Multiple People in Photos on an iPhone 18 Pro Max

Luckily, it’s easy to fix duplicate people albums in Photos by merging them together. You can even merge People albums for totally different people into one, if you want to create one album for your entire family or group of friends. Follow these steps to merge different People albums into one on an iPhone:

1. Open Photos and go to Collections > People & Pets (or People) and tap Edit.

   

2. Select the people you want to merge.
3. Tap the More button in the bottom-right corner, then tap Merge.
4. Tap Merge All Photos to confirm (even if they aren’t the same person and you want to merge them anyway).

Sort Through Your Photos by People

Merging multiple albums is quick and easy to do. All you have to do is select the profiles you want to merge together, then choose to Merge them together.

Merging albums of people will ensure your gallery is organized and error-free. Or you can use the option to create an album of a specific group of people together, though it’s usually best to use the Search feature for that.

The Photos app automatically identifies people in your Photos to curate People albums for each of them. However, Apple’s artificial intelligence isn’t perfect, and oftentimes, your Apple devices will make an error and save the wrong person in someone else’s album. This can happen due to the poor quality of a picture, the similarities of someone’s face, or various other reasons.

Here’s how you can review photos of identified people in the Photos app and fix any cases of mistaken identity, where your iPhone 18 Pro Max has tagged one person as someone else.

How to Fix Misidentified People in Photos on iPhone

If your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max has misidentified someone in a photo, they won’t show up when you search for them and instead Photos will save pictures of them in someone else’s album. What’s more, that person—who might be a stranger—will show up in the People album for whoever your iPhone thinks they are! See Same Person Twice in Photos on iPhone 18 Pro Max. Here’s how to fix it:

1. In Photos, go to Collections > People & Pets (or People) and tap the profile you want to remove a misidentified picture from.

   

2. Tap Select and select the misidentified photos you want to remove.
3. Tap the More button at the top of the screen.
4. Choose This is Not X, and the selected photos will be removed from that album.

Easily Sort Pictures With the People & Pets Collection

The People & Pets collection in Photos is a great way to view your photo library in an organized way. You can easily look back at all your memories with a particular person without needing to scroll past a sea of unrelated pictures.

However, having misidentified photos in the wrong albums can be quite a nuisance to deal with. Fortunately, the problem has a relatively quick and easy fix. You can remove any mismatched pictures you stumble across.

Given their small size, misplacing AirPods is almost inevitable. If you tend to put your AirPods in your pocket or find one bud looser in your ears than the other, you have a higher chance of losing one AirPod. Here are the options you have in such a situation.

1 Locate Your Lost AirPod via Find My

The first (and probably the best) shot you have at finding your lost AirPod is to attempt to locate it using Apple’s Find My app. To locate your lost AirPod using the Find My app, here’s what you need to do:

1. Open the Find My app on your iPhone 18 Pro Max or Mac.
2. Head to the Devices tab. Here, you can see all your Apple devices that use the same Apple Account and have Find My enabled.
3. Select your AirPods from the list. Then, simply select the bud you’ve misplaced.

You’ll see a list of options to help you locate your lost AirPods, such as playing a sound or getting directions. You can also activate Apple’s Lost Mode from the same menu. This way, you’ll be notified when someone finds your AirPods and the finder will be able to see your contact details.

You can only use Find My to locate your lost AirPod if you had Find My enabled on a paired iPhone 18 Pro Max or Mac prior to misplacing it. If not, you’ll need to consider one of the options below.

2 Opt for a Replacement

If Find My wasn’t enabled on a paired Apple device and you couldn’t locate your lost AirPod by retracing your steps, your next best option is to replace your lost AirPod. According to Apple’s Get an Estimate tool, if you have the first, second, or third-gen AirPods, a replacement AirPod will cost you around $69.

For the first or second-generation AirPods Pro, you can expect to pay around $89 for a replacement.

The above pricing is applicable even if you paid for an AppleCare+ extended warranty plan when you purchased your AirPods.

3 Get New AirPods Instead

Purchasing new AirPods is usually a much better option than spending $69 or $89 on a replacement bud. If you’ve been using your AirPods for a few years and own an older model (like the first-gen AirPods or AirPods Pro), it may be time to start fresh and upgrade to a newer model anyway. Newer models often feature improvements like better active noise cancellation (ANC), battery life, and more.

While getting new AirPods will cost you much more than the price of one replacement AirPod, the new features ultimately make the investment worthwhile. If you look around a bit, you’ll find AirPods on sale on Amazon or stores like Best Buy, especially during the holiday season or sales events like Prime Day.

After you successfully pair AirPods to your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max, they are automatically added to Find My and should show up in the Find My app. However, if they don’t, we’ll show you some quick solutions to fix it below.

But before that, here are the benefits of adding your AirPods to Apple’s Find My app.

Why You May Want to Show AirPods in Find My

There are lots of benefits to adding your AirPods to the Find My app. These are some ways that Find My helps you track and find your AirPods:

• After your AirPods show in Find My, you can make them play a sound if they’re lost to find one or both of the missing buds.
• Find My lets you see the last known locations of your AirPods on a map. If they aren’t connected, you can still see the last time and location they were online and get directions to that place.
• You can use the Find My Network to locate your AirPods Pro or AirPods Max and get precise directions to them when nearby.

Now that you know the importance of getting your AirPods added to the Find My app, here are the solutions to fix it when they don’t show up in it.

For several of the Find My solutions mentioned below, you must have your AirPods with you.

1. Make Sure Find My Is Enabled for Your Paired Device

When you set up your iPhone, Find My is switched on by default. And when you pair your AirPods to this iPhone, Find My is automatically enabled for the AirPods too. You don’t have to take any other steps. However, if you later turn off Find My for your iPhone, it will have the same effect for your AirPods as well.

Keep your AirPods connected to your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max and follow these steps to ensure Find My is enabled for it:

1. Open Settings and tap [Your Name] at the top.

   

2. Tap Find My.
3. If Find My iPhone is turned off, tap it and enable it from the next screen.
4. Now open the Find My app and tap Devices. Your AirPods should appear here.

2. Enable the Find My Network for Newer AirPods

The Find My Network uses other nearby Apple devices to securely transmit your lost AirPods’ location to you. When the Find My network is on, you can see the location of AirPods 3, AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max in the Find My app for up to 24 hours after they last connect to your device, even if they’re not nearby.

Here’s how to enable Find My Network for your AirPods so that you can locate them using the Find My app in the future:

1. Connect your AirPods to your iPhone 18 Pro Max.
2. Open Settings on your iPhone and tap Bluetooth.
3. Tap the Info (i) button next to your AirPods.
4. Scroll down, then turn on Find My Network (if you don’t see that option, first tap Find My).

3. Put Your AirPods in the Charging Case and Restart Your iPhone 18 Pro Max

Sometimes, your AirPods might not show up in the Find My app on your iPhone or Mac due to temporary glitches, which can be easily solved by a simple restart.

To address this, put your AirPods in their charging case and close the lid. Now go ahead and restart your iPhone or the Apple device you’re checking the Find My app on. Simultaneously press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear, then drag the Power Off slider. Press and hold the side button until the Apple logo appears.

4. Check Apple’s System Status for the Find My Service

On rare occasions, the problem may not be on your end but on Apple’s. To check, visit Apple’s System Status page. Here, make sure you see a green circle next to Apple Account, iCloud Account & Sign In, iCloud Web Apps, and Maps.

If these services show a yellow or red symbol, it means they’re facing an outage. You’ll need to wait for Apple to fix it. After that, open the Find My app or go to iCloud.com/find to locate your AirPods.

5. Use iCloud.com Instead of the Find My App

When you can’t locate your AirPods in the Find My app, try using this service in a browser instead. Here are the steps for that:

1. Go to icloud.com/find, then sign in to your Apple Account (if necessary).
2. On mobile, you should see your AirPods here. On a computer, click All Devices, and your AirPods should appear in the list.

6. Ensure Your AirPods Are Charged

If your AirPods are dead, they won’t show their location in the Find My app. The most you can see in this situation is their last known location. To charge your AirPods, put them in their charging case. If the case has no battery left, connect it to power.

7. Find My Isn’t Available With a Managed Apple Account

You won’t have access to Find My while using a managed Apple Account assigned to you by your school, college, or office. As a result, you won’t be able to see your AirPods (or any device) in the Find My app. The solution is to sign in to a personal Apple Account on your connected device instead.

8. Unpair Your AirPods and Pair Them Again

When none of the above fixes work, it’s time to unpair your AirPods and pair them again. These steps will show you how to do that:

1. Put the AirPods in their charging case.
2. Open your iPhone Settings and tap Bluetooth.
3. Tap the Info (i) button next to your AirPods.
4. Tap Forget This Device > Forget Device.
5. Restart your iPhone.
6. Now, pair the AirPods to your device again.

9. Update Your AirPods Firmware

Like software updates on your iPhone, AirPods get firmware updates to fix bugs and introduce new features. Thus, to get the best possible AirPods experience and to fix any problems, learn how to update your AirPods to the latest firmware. Connect your charging case to power. Put your AirPods in their charging case and close the lid. Wait at least 30 minutes for the firmware to update.

10. Reset Your AirPods

Finally, if the issue continues, the penultimate option is to reset your AirPods. This will remove the AirPods from all earlier devices you have paired them with, and you’ll have to connect them again from scratch. Doing this fixes several major problems with the AirPods, including when they don’t show in the Find My app.

AirPods 1, 2, or 3, or AirPods Pro 1 or 2: Put the AirPods in their case, close the lid, then wait 30 seconds. Open the lid, then press and hold the setup button on the back of the case for about 15 seconds, until the status light flashes amber, then white.

AirPods 4 or 5, or AirPods Pro 3: Put the AirPods in their case, close the lid, then wait 30 seconds. Open the lid, then double-tap the front of the case three times. When you successfully reset your AirPods, the status light flashes amber, then white.

AirPods Max: On the right headphone, press and hold the Digital Crown and the listening mode button at the same time, until the status light next to the charging port changes from flashing amber to flashing white (around 15 seconds).

11. Find My Won’t Show Your AirPods if It’s Been Too Long

Technically, Find My shows the last known AirPods location, even when their battery dies. But if it’s been a particularly long time, Find My might not show any location for your AirPods, even though it still lists them in the Find My app.

My old AirPods still show up in the list of devices. But after tapping their name, the map shows no location or relevant details except giving the option to play a sound (which won’t work until the AirPods come online). The only solution for this is to connect and use your AirPods again.

Locate Your AirPods in the Find My App Again

Since AirPods don’t have network connectivity and rely on your iPhone 18 Pro Max or another connected device to show up in Find My, it can be pretty tough to find them if they ever go missing.

Nevertheless, the Find My service is handy and can be used to learn the last known location, get directions, and play sounds from missing devices. All these features make it very worthwhile to add your AirPods to Find My, and the above solutions should ensure they appear correctly.

Taking a decent selfie is difficult enough, but when you tap the shutter button and check the finished article you’ll notice one more issue: the photo has been flipped, mirror-image-style, from the composition you lined up.

If that’s an irritation you’d like to solve, you’ve come to the right place. In this article we explain why the phone is flipping your selfies, how to take a selfie that doesn’t get flipped, and how to flip or unflip any iPhone 18 Pro Max photo.

Why do selfies get flipped?

This may blow your mind, but the truth is that selfies don’t really get flipped when you take the shot: they get unflipped.

Before selfies came along, most of the sights we’d get of our own faces would be in mirrors and other reflective surfaces – surfaces that produce reflections with left and right reversed. Tech designers often choose to imitate pre-digital experiences in order to make their products more intuitive to use, and so it was with the cameraphone: when you switch to the front-facing camera, your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max shows you a mirror image, because that’s what you expect to see.

Once you press the shutter, however, it is felt that mirroring is no longer necessary or desirable. The final photo will be returned to the correct, unflipped composition, because that is what the camera ‘saw’. That final image is what you really looked like at the moment the photo was taken.

It’s a bit of a fudge, but on the whole this is probably the best way of organising things. If the viewfinder showed an unflipped image, we’d all find it strange (waving your left hand would move the hand on the other side of the screen, for instance). But it would similarly be strange if the finished photo remained flipped – all the photos other people took of you would have your hair parted on one side, but all your selfies would show it parted on the other.

As broadly logical as it is, however, many people don’t like the current system.

Fortunately iOS added an easy way to flip (or unflip) an iPhone selfie, so we can easily fix the problem.

Flipping an iPhone 18 Pro Max selfie

Open the Photos app and select the selfie. Tap Edit, then tap the little crop tool (two intersecting right angles).

At this point Photos is likely to apply some minor reframing edits automatically; they will probably improve the shot but if not, tap the yellow AUTO button at the top to remove them. Finally, tap the Flip button – the triangles. This will flip the selfie. Tap it again to unflip.

There you go: it’s as simple as that.

How to take a selfie that doesn’t get flipped

To take a selfie that captures the shot as you see it in the front-facing camera frame, rather than reversing it, go to Settings > Camera, then turn on Mirror Front Camera.

Cellular carriers limit the number of devices you own logged into the same iCloud account that can place voice calls to the regular phone network via Wi-Fi. You might encounter this error as: “Wi-Fi Calling: You have registered the maximum number of devices for this service.”

Sometimes, it’s legitimate: You have more devices than permitted, even though this number isn’t publicized or displayed in the iPhone interface. Many carriers have a five-device total in addition to your iPhone 18 Pro Max. However, others see it when they aren’t using Wi-Fi Calling or below the limit.

Here’s how many users have figured out how to solve the problem.

Start with the basics

Wi-Fi Calling is Apple’s implementation of a clever idea that extends voice-network calling. When you place a phone call to a number using your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max, it typically occurs by your phone using its connection to a nearby cellular tower, which patches it into the public switched telephone network (PSTN, if you like abbreviations).

Apple lets you set your iPhone so that your other devices connected to the same iCloud account can place cellular calls via your iPhone as long as they are both nearby (within Bluetooth range to detect proximity) and connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Those details are to ensure quality.

Wi-Fi Calling takes that a step further. With this feature enabled, your iPhone and other devices skip the cellular link and use Wi-Fi to connect over the Internet to the carrier’s calling hub and, from there, out to the PSTN to complete the call. The advantage of Wi-Fi Calling is that your other devices don’t need to be near your iPhone to place a call.

You can enable Wi-Fi Calling in Settings > Cellular > Wi-Fi Calling. First, turn on Wi-Fi Calling on This iPhone. Go to the Settings app on your iPhone. Tap Apps, then tap Phone. Tap Calls on Other Devices, turn on Allow Calls on Other Devices, then choose the devices you want to allow to make and receive calls. (If the feature doesn’t appear in Settings > Cellular under your carrier’s section, check whether your provider offers the feature. If it does, call your carrier to see if they can fix the problem.)

Solving the limit warning

You can try to solve the problem causing the “maximum number of devices” error by changing the state of Wi-Fi Calling. It seems that each device registers with the carrier’s network, and carriers’ systems don’t always update immediately. Here’s what to try:

• At limit or below: If you have more than five devices and tried to connect another one, even if you previously reduced the total to under five, or if you’re clearly below the limit, try disabling Wi-Fi Calling for 48 to 72 hours, re-enabling it, and adding that new device again.
• Below limit: If you are well below the limit and receive the Wi-Fi Calling warning for no reason, enable Wi-Fi Calling briefly, maybe for minutes to hours. Then, disable it. Does the warning disappear?

If the above toggling doesn’t work, you will need to get on a call with your carrier and attempt to get them to solve the problem on their end.

Can you use an iPhone 18 Pro Max without a SIM card? Yes, you can. You can turn on and set up your new iPhone with an internet connection.

If you’d like your child to be able to use a spare phone without a SIM card – just accessing data via Wi-Fi – or you simply haven’t got a spare card available, you’ll be glad to know there are various ways to activate and use an iPhone without a SIM. In this article we walk you through the best approaches.

Note: iPhone 18 Pro Max models sold in the United States use advanced eSIM technology and are not compatible with physical SIM cards.

On a related note, you may also be looking for a way to activate the iPhone without needing to be connected to a Wi-Fi network. We have a method that will allow you to do this too.

Expect this process to be more challenging if your iPhone is locked to a certain carrier. For the purposes of this tutorial we will assume you’ve got an unlocked iPhone.

Activate your iPhone using your computer

This method’s effectiveness appears to depend on whether the phone is locked to a particular network.

The principal reason to use the computer method is if you have no Wi-Fi access.

What you’ll need:

• An unlocked iPhone
• A computer

And here’s how to activate your iPhone using this method:

1. If you’re using a PC, use the latest version of the Apple Devices app or iTunes.
2. Using the charging cable for your iPhone, connect iPhone to the USB port on your computer.
3. Assuming the phone isn’t locked to a carrier you will see an onscreen prompt in the Finder or in the Apple Devices app explaining what you need to do and the details you need to fill in to activate your iPhone.
4. Once activated, you’ll be able to use your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max on a Wi-Fi network.

Activate your iPhone using the emergency call feature

You may have seen reports suggesting that you can activate an iPhone without a SIM card by calling the emergency services.

Not only do we want to dissuade you from calling the emergency services unnecessarily, we would also warn you that when we tried this method out it didn’t work at all. We believe that the software flaw this method exploited has been patched.

AirTags are Apple’s Bluetooth tracking devices, designed to help you find any items that you’ve lost. They’re arguably one of the most important Apple devices you own if you use them to regularly find your lost items. But sometimes, AirTags can go wrong.

If you’re experiencing some problems with your AirTags, here are all the troubleshooting fixes you can use to get them back on track. Your AirTags should be working again in no time.

1. Reset Your AirTag

The first port of call is to reset your AirTag. This will reset any settings you’ve tweaked, disconnect the AirTag, and restore it to the factory default settings. Here’s how to reset an AirTag:

1. Head into the Find My app on your iPhone.
2. In the bottom tab, tap Items.
3. From the list that appears, tap on the name of the AirTag, then tap the More button.
4. Tap Remove, then follow the onscreen instructions.
5. This removes the AirTag from your Apple Account. However, the item must be reset before anyone can register it to their Apple Account.

Once you’ve reset it, set up the AirTag again as new by holding the tracker near your iPhone 18 Pro Max. Complete the setup, and you should be good to go!

2. Update Your iPhone to Get the Latest AirTag Updates

Did you know that AirTags actually receive software updates? When you update your iPhone, you also download the latest AirTag firmware. Then, when your iPhone is in range of an AirTag, it will automatically update the Bluetooth tracker.

Unfortunately, there is no way to manually update AirTags; just like you can’t manually update your AirPods. So, the best option is to update your iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max to the latest version of iOS, ensure your AirTag is in range, and wait for any software updates to complete. Go to the Settings app on your iPhone. Tap General, then tap Software Update. You can check the latest firmware version on the Apple Support page, and compare it to your AirTag’s version.

3. Enable Two-Factor Authentication for Your Apple Account

When trying to set up an AirTag, you may receive an error and a prompt to upgrade your account security. Since AirTags are linked to your iCloud account, Apple requires you to have some security options switched on.

To get rid of this error, you’ll need to switch on two-factor authentication. You can do so by heading into Settings > [Your Name] > Sign-In & Security and then tapping the Two-Factor Authentication button. You’ll be asked for some details, such as your phone number, and you can then set up the security feature. With the feature on, you’ll receive security prompts when signing in with your Apple Account.

You also need to make sure Find My is enabled for your iCloud account. Head into Settings > [Your Name] > Find My and make sure Find My iPhone says on. If not, tap the option to set up Find My on your iPhone 18 Pro Max.

4. Allow Find My to Use Your Precise Location

If Precision Finding isn’t working for you, there could be a few reasons for that. Also, you’ll need to be within range of the AirTag to establish a connection; this is about 10 meters, or 33 feet. Finally, ensure Bluetooth is enabled on your iPhone.

After that, if Precision Finding is still not working, you should ensure Find My has access to your Precise Location. To turn the feature on:

1. Head into the Settings app, scroll down, and tap on Privacy & Security.
2. At the top, tap Location Services.

   

3. Scroll through the app list until you see Find My. Tap it.
4. At the bottom of the page, ensure the Precise Location toggle is switched on.

Luckily, if Precision Finding is still not working, you can still use AirTags. Thanks to a normal Bluetooth connection and using Apple’s Find My network, you’ll still be able to see the approximate AirTag location.

5. Use the Same Apple Account on Every Device

AirTags rely on your iCloud account to sync to your other devices. You can locate your AirTags on any Apple device using the Find My app. If you’re not seeing your AirTags on another device, make sure you’re signed in with the same Apple Account you use on your iPhone 18 Pro Max. If you’ve forgotten your login details, you can reset your Apple Account password.

Another important feature you need enabled on every device is Find My. Just like enabling Find My on iPhone above, you need to ensure it’s enabled on the devices you’re trying to view your AirTags on.

6. Enable the Find My Network

If you’re out of range of an AirTag and can’t see its location, chances are you’ve got the Find My network switched off. The Find My network allows all Apple devices to securely ping AirTags to get the location, allowing you to see that location on the map. It’s arguably one of the biggest selling points of Apple’s Bluetooth tracker.

Here’s how to switch on the Find My network:

1. Head into the Settings app.
2. Then, navigate to [Your Name] > Find My.
3. Tap on the Find My iPhone button at the top.
4. Ensure the toggle for the Find My network is switched on.

7. Replace the Battery

If you’ve got Bluetooth enabled, got the Find My network enabled, and you’re in range of the AirTag but it’s still not showing up in the Find My app, it’s likely that the battery is flat. Apple promises the battery lasts for a year in AirTags, and we’ve actually found it to last longer in some instances.

To change the battery on an AirTag:

1. Push down on the metal back cover and twist it anti-clockwise to take it off.
2. Once the AirTag is open, remove the battery.
3. Pop a new CR2032 coin battery into the AirTag.
4. Place the cover back on and twist it clockwise to secure it.

The other good thing about replacing the battery is that it acts as a way of turning the AirTag off and on again (it wouldn’t be tech troubleshooting if we didn’t mention that little tip). If the battery wasn’t the issue, the quick off-and-on-again could fix another bug at play.

Make Sure You’re Using Your AirTags Correctly

Problems with any tech device can be annoying, but when it’s the tracker you rely on to find lost items, they can be really annoying. If you’ve been experiencing any of these problems, try these quick fixes to get back on track. If you’re still having issues with Precision Finding, for example, there are other steps you can try.