Enable the feature on all your Apple hardware, and you'll be able to see the current location of any device on a map.
On a computer, open System Preferences and click iCloud. Then tick the Find My Mac box. During this process, Apple may prompt you to sign in with your Apple ID credentials, so make sure you have your password close to hand. Once you've enabled the tracker, you can forget about it until you need it.
App Store Preview
If you do lose a device, grab your remaining machine s and open the appropriate app: Sign in, click the All Devices menu, and pick a device to see its location on a map. Within this app, you can also select a device and prompt it to make a sound, lock itself, or erase all its data. The lock option is particularly useful because you can make the lost device display a custom message. For example, if you lose your iPhone, make the gadget share a message requesting its safe return and providing an email address where finders can contact you.
And to prevent those finders from snooping further, locking the screen will protect your data. Turn the feature on to start tracking your phone or tablet. Then install the Find My Device app on a backup phone or tablet. To see where your gadget is, you have a few options. Open the app on your backup device, visit the Find My Device web portal , or just sign into your Google account and then type "where's my device? As with the Apple service, you can make the lost machine play a sound even when it's in silent mode , lock the device while its screen displays a message, or completely erase your information.
Smart Finder - Bluetooth Smart Object Locator on the App Store
Check out a map to view its last known location, battery level, and even the name of the Wi-Fi network it's currently connected to. Based on this information, you can decide whether it's gone forever or still can be retrieved. Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer similar protections for Chromebooks—at least for the time being. So if you lose one of these Chrome OS-powered laptops , you won't be able to find it through Google. However, keep reading to learn about a third-party app that may be able to do the job.
Samsung owners can use the aforementioned Google tracker or Samsung's built-in Find My Mobile tool, which works very similarly. To access it, first set up a password-protected Samsung account. Next, enable the tracker by opening Settings , tapping Lock screen and security , and choosing Find My Mobile. On this menu, make sure to toggle the Remote controls switch to On so that you can operate your phone or tablet from another device. If your gadget goes missing, head to the Find My Mobile website and sign in with your Samsung credentials.
Here, you can check out the last known location of your phone or tablet on a map. Like with the other tracker apps, you can ring your device even if it's in quiet mode, lock it so nobody else will be able to access it, and wipe it remotely if you don't think you're going to get it back. From the same website, you can perform other useful tasks, such as unlocking a device whose PIN you've forgotten and backing up data.
Just pick the relevant option from the list on the right-hand side of the site. Plus, it offers a few handy features its competitors don't, such as the ability to snap a picture with the device's camera or view its screen activity , potentially allowing you to deduce a thief's identity. Like you do with the other tools mentioned above, download the Prey app onto your device of choice and create an account.
Once a Tile is paired with your phone, you can use the accessory in a few different ways. Alternatively, tapping the icon of the Tile in the app displays graphical rings that fill in as you get closer to the device. If the Tile is out of Bluetooth range, you can view a map displaying its location the last time your phone made contact with it. More on that in a bit. We were able to get about feet away before losing the connection with our iPhone. The Sport and Style put up similar numbers—within a few feet of one another.
Tile advertises the Sport and Style as being twice as loud as the Tile Mate, which has an decibel alarm. When we measured the three side by side using a decibel meter, however, we found them all to be in the same volume range, off by just a decibel or two. Yet the Sport and Style sounded louder, and we could hear them from farther away. If you designate a Tile Sport or Style or any other Tile as lost in the app, you can use the Community Find feature to help find it.
Find Your Tile
This feature takes advantage of anyone using the Tile app on a phone or tablet: If one of those devices passes within Bluetooth range of your lost tracker, you get an alert on your phone and an email with the location at which it was detected. This feature worked as advertised in our testing. This includes not only its position—for several years going—as the best seller on Amazon, but also the number of reviews it has there, and our anecdotal experiences seeing the Tile in use in the wild. As a point of reference, the Tile app tells you how many other active Tile users are within roughly 5 to 6 miles of your current location: The Tile family is also the only Bluetooth tracker we encountered with an Apple Watch app that shows connected Tiles on a map and lets you trigger alarms.
It displays your devices on a map, and if one is lost, you can ring it or display a message on its lock screen.
Tile is also building out its platform, incorporating its tracking technology into third-party devices. At the CES trade show, Tile announced partnerships with companies such as Bose, Samsonite, and Comcast, bringing its technology to more places and more devices. Perhaps the biggest downside to the Tile Sport and Style are their lack of a replaceable battery.
Screenshots
As you approach a year of use, the app begins to pester you about the battery running dry—when it does die, the hardware is dead. For a discount compared with the price of a fresh purchase , the company will ship you a new replacement, and you can even choose to purchase a different Tile model to get the latest and greatest. The Tile Sport and Style also lack geofencing features—at least officially.
However, Tile has made a geofencing feature—the company calls it Smart Alerts—available to some people as a beta feature. As with all the other trackers, the Tile app has to be running, at least in the background, for it to communicate with the hardware. The Tile Mate is the least expensive way to get into the Tile ecosystem, and it works well if you have the right expectations.
Even though Tile advertises the Pro Series models as being twice as loud 98 decibels, compared with 88 , we got the same level of about 90 decibels from each. But there seems to be a psychoacoustic element going on: The Sport and Style seem louder to our ears, and we could hear them from farther away.
It has a larger footprint than the Tile Mate at 2. But the Slim is really the only option if you want something super thin, and it has all the other benefits you get with a Tile. We think the Tile ecosystem includes the best trackers for most people, but it does have its flaws.
Six apps and trackers to find your lost gadgets
Chief among them is the lack of a tracker with a replaceable battery. Instead of having to send in the TrackR when the battery dies, contributing to e-waste, you can simply twist off the back and throw in a new CR coin battery. We also really like that the Pixel has flashing lights, in addition to audible alerts—a nice extra for finding your stuff. You can ring the TrackR Pixel from your phone or your phone from the tracker , and see its last known location on a map.
The app provides the expected crowdsourced finding feature, and you can get an alert if your phone and TrackR Pixel are moved too far away from one another. In head-to-head tests in June , the TrackR Pixel averaged distances of The Chipolo Plus is an impressively good clone of the second-generation Tile which is no longer available. The Chipolo Plus worked well in our tests, but its ranges and alarm volume were comparable with those of the Tile Mate, rather than with those of the better Tile Style and Sport. Chipolo also has fewer users than Tile, making its crowd-finding system less robust.
On Amazon, 44 percent of the reviews were one star at the time of our original review; those numbers are up to 57 and , respectively, at the time of this writing. We rarely see any sort of product with ratings that bad.
An updated version of the TrackR Bravo was released in October with supposedly improved range and a louder alarm compared with the original. In our testing, however, Bluetooth range was poor, even with the new hardware: These results were terrible compared with the other models we tested at the time, and much worse compared with current Tile trackers.
The Pebblebee Honey has some great attributes, at least at first glance. The battery is replaceable, and it has a crowd-finding feature. The XY Find It offers proper geofencing, but the tracker has no way of pinging a paired phone, disqualifying it from a top spot. A newer version, XY3 , does offer this feature but has middling reviews.
We chose not to test the Mynt Smart Tracker. It makes plenty of lofty promises in terms of both features and design, but owner reviews are particularly negative, citing bad connections, short battery life, and poor instructions. No professional reviews say any different. We waited well over a year to try the Pixie tracker, intrigued by the promise of its augmented-reality companion app. We finally tested it in early , and we were disappointed by how impractical it was.