You touch your pants pocket and there, your heart drops to your stomach: where is your smartphone? It’s panic, you get agitated and search frantically in all your pockets and in your bag. If it cannot be found, you are considering completely flipping your apartment. Finally, your smartphone is waiting for you under a cushion on the sofa…
A few years ago, Apple wanted to solve this problem by imagining a functionality that is now essential to all its users: Find my device (or Locate, in French). If you have an iPhone, Airpods or a Macbook, you have probably already used this feature at least once. We tell you its origin.
A “life-saving” feature
Losing your smartphone, what anguish! Today, Apple’s “Find” feature is essential for all owners of an Apple device. If it is a question of a crucial functionality of the Cupertino company, it was an intern who came up with the idea. Like what…
Let’s take a quick trip to the end of the 2000s. During Apple’s WWDC in 2009, the Cupertino company announced the first Find My iPhone application. The latter will be available a little later that year, when the iPhone OS 3 is released. That doesn’t make us any younger. Originally, the Find My iPhone application is not accessible to everyone, and only members of Apple’s MobileMe service can benefit from it. But everything changed in 2011 when Steve Jobs’ teams unveiled iCloud. This is where this now essential feature becomes available for free to all users.
Today, the “Find my device” application is pre-installed on all Apple devices. Whether you have a MacBook, iPhone, Apple Watch, or iPad, you can easily find your device. For around ten years, you can even always have an eye on your suitcase or your keys thanks to Airtags. Some users even use them to locate their pets (although this is not recommended).
If this functionality is now essential for Apple users, it was an intern from the Cupertino company who highlighted the universal panic of losing your iPhone. The rest, we know it. Ultimately, Apple has only responded to a problem that everyone has already encountered at least once. As Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of services, explains, it’s not a genius idea. “But no one thought about it until we did it”. Since then, Apple has paved the way and its competitors have followed suit.
