By Glenn Fleishman

September 1, 2025 8:45 AM PT

Don’t despair, de-pair! Free your AirPods from tracking

The Find My system lets you find lost things and alerts you when you leave something behind. But because devices (things that can contact the Internet) and items (things like AirTags that can transmit Bluetooth signals) are so trackable, it means you have valid concerns when something you own could be followed by someone you don’t know.

My pal Lex Friedman, known to all as a stand-up guy (he does comedy, too), wrote me a few weeks ago with a question on that front:

A few years ago, I bought AirPods Max from Amazon. They were used, like new. They’re great. They’re linked to my Apple ID. It’s wonderful. Except they’re also linked to someone else’s Apple ID. Which I know because iOS constantly warns me that the original owner can see where I live and where I go.

Is there anything I can do to permanently disconnect the old owner from potentially having access to these AirPods?

Indeed, there is! And Lex did it. And it worked. As usual, you can jump ahead if you don’t want to learn the fascinating background and want to skip to the chase. (Lex would read the whole thing.)

An invisible glowing network of location transmission

Apple has grown its Find My ecosystem slowly over the years into the current octopus of coverage with which it girdles the world. Initially designed to help track iPhones—lost or stolen, but probably stolen—you can now keep tabs on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. A few years ago, Apple added or improved tracking for audio hardware sold under its name or the Beats brand.

Broadly, Apple labels these things devices: Anything that can connect directly to the Internet to update its location or anything that has a paired relationship with a device that it can relay through to report its location.

Apple also introduced a second kind of thing, which it calls items (as in Find My items): initially AirTags, then followed by Apple-licensed third-party tracking hardware, now available from about two dozen companies, who compete on form factor, battery life, and recharging capability.

To prevent iPhones from being stolen, erased, and reused, Apple added Activation Lock over a decade ago. It later extended it to the iPad, Mac, and Watch. When you disable Find My on a device, this also disables Activation Lock. Activation Lock can be removed remotely, too, by removing the device from your set of Apple hardware in Settings > Your Name (iPhone/iPad), System Settings > Your Name (Mac), or via icloud.com/find.

After the AirTag was introduced, Apple added Find My Lock, which keeps AirTags and third-party Find My items from being reset and used with other devices. Because audio hardware is not exactly a “device” and not exactly an “item,” this lock applies to them, too.

Originally called Pairing Lock, you couldn’t remove this connection unless the item was within Bluetooth range of your paired device. However, Apple updated the AirTag and item firmware, and now you can remove it while you are not within range using the Find My app (iPhone, iPad, or Mac) in the Items tab.

I spy someone named Lex

Lex bought his AirPods Max used. He was able to pair them with his iPhone and see them in his Apple Account. However, their location never appeared for him—and iOS warned him the original owner could see his location.

This happened because the original owner didn’t carry out all the necessary steps before selling. You can pair AirPods 3, AirPods 4 (ANC), AirPods Pro (all models), and AirPods Max with multiple Apple Accounts. However, Apple mentions in a footnote to one of their support documents, “…only the person who turned on the Find My network can see them in the Find My app. You may also get an alert if someone else’s AirPods are traveling with you.”

Lex was not precisely concerned about this, as he didn’t know who the former owner was. But it’s a little bit of a worry, because you don’t really want to have your whereabouts known to a random person, either.

I’d also like to know why the former owner apparently didn’t see a random set of AirPods Max in Find My and remove them—perhaps they never use Find My or have lost access to the Apple device with which the AirPods Max were associated. And the Apple Account. Because the AirPods Max don’t appear in your Apple Account, only in a native Find My app, that’s a possibility.

Fortunately, the solution was easy. It just required Lex trusting that I knew what the heck I was suggesting. That’s what friends are for.

Lex first removed the AirPods Max from his Apple Account by using Find My. Here’s how you do this:

1. Go to the Find My app; let’s use the iPhone/iPad version as the example here.
2. Tap the Devices button. (Audio hardware appears under that tab.)
3. Select your audio device. In my example, that’s my AirPods Pro.
4. Swipe to the bottom and tap Remove and confirm to remove.

This action removes the Find My Lock, removes the audio device from your Apple Account, and unpairs the device from Bluetooth.

Lex confirmed that the AirPods Max no longer appeared in his Apple Account or in Find My. He followed the normal procedure to pair the headphones again. And, lo and behold, he saw them in Find My! My usual fee ($0.00) applied.

For more reading

My book Take Control of Find My and AirTags covers all the ins and outs of the increasingly baroque but increasingly helpful Find My network and technology. If you’re trying to track your car or find it in a parking lot, keep an eye on baggage in transit, discover where your pet has disappeared to, or need to recover a lost or stolen laptop, the book will help. Plus, tons of information and tips about preventing unwanted tracking, and what to do if you believe someone is tracking you—or attempting to—without your knowledge.

A new edition is coming in a few weeks with updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and watchOS 26. Purchase today, and you will get a free update to the new versions (and all later updates to the same edition).

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Joe Rosensteel

August 28, 2025 10:00 AM PT

A better camera app? Reflections on Adobe’s Project Indigo

I appreciate what Adobe is doing with Project Indigo. It’s a free iOS camera app, but it is heavily disclaimed as being experimental with unique features you can’t find in other apps. But Adobe also says they’re targeting “casual” photographers, which seems misguided.

A few people I know have even been evangelizing Project Indigo because they love it so much, especially when they compare it to photos from Apple’s Camera app. My enthusiasm for this product doesn’t match their own. It’s neat but it’s not great.

It isn’t all-purpose (it can only take still photos), and it can’t do panoramas or portrait mode. It doesn’t have the compressed storage of the editable HEIC files Apple introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro, or the new photographic styles pipeline that lets a user control tone mapping and certain processing, both before the photo is taken and after the fact.

There are still a few noteworthy tricks it pulls off that are worth a look.

Continue reading “A better camera app? Reflections on Adobe’s Project Indigo”…

By Jason Snell

August 26, 2025 9:16 AM PT

Apple event set for September 9

Apple is nothing if not consistent. That announcement we all expected might happen today, happened today: Apple is giving the world two weeks’ notice that its next media event (which we all know is an iPhone launch event, though Apple never admits that) will be on September 9 at 10am Pacific.

The tag line for this event is: “Awe dropping.” It’s expected to include new iPhone and iPhone Pro models as well as a new, ultra-thin iPhone design never seen before.

If the usual timelines continue to be usual, this means the first new iPhones will arrive in the hands of Apple customers on September 19, and Apple will presumably release the first official versions of its new 26-era operating systems earlier that week.

By Glenn Fleishman

August 25, 2025 7:46 AM PT

Demote a macOS administrator to a standard user

Tear those epaulettes off one of your admin accounts in macOS. It knows what it did! And what’s that? It’s just too darned powerful. An account marked as an administrator can carry out nearly every operation—probably every operation—on your Mac during an active session.

Six Colors reader Bob writes in with a question about that:¹

Back in the Mac OS 9 days, I had a single user account (“Bartleby”), which had administrator privileges by default. Once I entered the OS X era, I kept the account as-is, but I added additional administrator accounts as fallbacks. Many years of inertia have gotten me to macOS 12 while still using my main account as an admin account, but I would prefer not to.

I’m planning to upgrade my Mac soon, and it seems like a good time to demote Bartleby from admin to standard. I’d use one of the other administrator accounts’ credentials when admin privileges are needed. Are there any issues that might arise if I remove admin status from that original Bartleby account?

One of the joys of answering questions is that I encounter issues I’ve never written about before. There are factors to weight with account privileges before you eject a Bartleby from his administrative post, starving him of his power.

Account types in macOS

Let’s do a quick review of account types, something that’s remained fairly static in macOS for many years. There are four main types of Mac user accounts: administrator, standard, guest user, and sharing-only. Of these, administrator and standard are by far the most common. The usual reason to have more than one account is so that each person who uses a particular Mac can have a separate space for files and settings. But accounts can also be used to restrict access to certain files or resources in order to improve your security.

Every Mac needs at least one administrator account. When you set up a new Mac or perform a clean installation of macOS, you are be prompted to create an administrator account before you can do anything else. That’s because only administrators can perform certain crucial tasks. You can have more than one administrator account. In some cases, you may want to set up an extra one to use for testing and troubleshooting.

The risk is that administrator accounts are all-powerful. Administrators can create, modify, and delete other user accounts. They can unlock any pane of System Settings, and authorize any type of software installation. They can (with a quick trip to the Terminal utility) open any file on the Mac, belonging to any user—and can change any non–system file’s permissions. They can upgrade macOS to a new version. The list goes on and on.

So not only is an administrator account overkill for users on a Mac who don’t need such privileges, it can be a toehold for a naive user to grant permission to the few pieces of malware that successfully target Macs. If someone with an administrator account launches an app, that app has more expansive access to files on the Mac, although Apple’s sandboxing limits that scope somewhat.² A malicious or compromised app launched by someone with an administrator account might be able to do serious damage across the Mac.

Even sophisticated users may want to work in the constraints of a standard app, because you can get most things done. Standard users can run apps, work with files, and perform most ordinary day-to-day tasks. When you or another user with a standard account tries to do something that only an administrator is allowed to do, simply entering an administrator’s username and password (or having an administrator do so) does the trick—there’s no need to log out or switch accounts first.

So you can downgrade your primary account to a standard one as long as you have an administrator account that you may rarely log into, but which you invoke when you need those privileges.

Turn down the power

If you’re ready to adjust your settings, here’s what to do:

• Start by making sure you have a working administrator account that you can log into. You want to be absolutely positive that this is functional before you downgrade another account.³
• Make sure there’s nothing that relies on the account you plan to downgrade that needs administrator privileges, though those tend to be specialized items, like scripts or crontab entries that run in the background.
• Are there files or folders that you’re using administrator privileges to access? With permissions still intact, it’s much easier to move files into locations that your user account will have access to, and to use File > Get Info with files or folders selected to make sure that you have the permissions you need as that user. (You can fix this later, too.)

Now, follow these steps:

1. Log out of your standard account. ( > Log Out User Name.)
2. Log into the administrator account you’ll use in the future for authorizations as needed.
3. Go to  > System Settings > Users & Groups.
4. Click the info icon to the right of the your logged-out user’s name.
5. Disable “Allow this user to administer this computer.”
6. Enter the current administrator user’s name and password and click Unlock.
7. Click OK at the dialog that notes “You must restart the computer for your changes to User Name‘s administrator settings to take effect.”
8. Restart your Mac.
9. Log into your now reduced-in-power main user.

If you’ve used a Mac for a while, you might recall that, with FileVault enabled, you may need to enable this new downgraded user to have permission to log in from a “cold start” (power off) or restart. Check  > System Settings > Privacy & Security > FileVault. Apple says you might see an Enable Users button with FileVault turned on. If so, click it, and make sure that your demoted user is authenticated for FileVault logins.

Now you’re set! See if you can get “Bartleby” to work.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]