Find My on iPad and Mac: track tags without your iPhone

Why the second device matters

Almost every guide to tracking assumes the iPhone is in your hand and working. Real days are less tidy. The phone runs out of battery halfway through a journey. It gets left in the office with the keys you are now trying to find. Somebody borrows it. And on a trip, the person who can most usefully check where a bag has got to is often the one still at home in a different time zone.

Anything signed in to your Apple Account carries the same Items list. That is the point worth internalising: your tags are attached to the account, not to a handset.

Setting up Find My on iPad

If the iPad is already signed in to your Apple Account, there is essentially nothing to do, open Find My, tap Items, and everything you have paired is there. Two settings are worth checking anyway:

1. Location Services on, in Settings → Privacy & Security. Without it the map is a map of nothing.
2. Find My iPad enabled, in Settings → your name → Find My. This also protects the iPad itself, which is the more common emergency.
3. The right account. Households with an old family iPad often find it is signed in to a long-forgotten Apple Account. Check before you rely on it.

From the iPad you can see each item's last confirmed position and timestamp, play a sound on it if it is within Bluetooth range of that device, get directions to it, and put it into Lost Mode.

What a Mac adds, and what it does not

The Find My app on a Mac is the same list again, on a bigger screen, which makes it the pleasant way to do the fiddly jobs: renaming items, tidying up notifications, checking battery levels across a dozen tags before a holiday, or watching a bag's position while you get on with something else.

What no secondary device can do is act as the tag's local radio when it is not nearby. Playing a sound requires a device within Bluetooth range, roughly 60 m in the open, less through walls. A Mac in Manchester cannot ring a tag in Málaga; it can only show you where the network last saw it.

Similarly, Notify When Left Behind is a feature of the device you actually carry. It works by noticing that you and the item have parted company, so it belongs on the iPhone in your pocket, not on the iMac in the study.

The setup worth doing before you travel

This is the part people wish they had done a week earlier.

• Share the important items. Since iOS 17 you can share an item with family and friends, and each of them can see it, ring it and get directions. Share the suitcase with whoever you are travelling with, and consider sharing the house keys with whoever is feeding the cat.
• Do not share by handing over your password. Item sharing exists precisely so you never have to.
• Check the iPad at home is charged and on the wifi if you are relying on someone using it. A tablet in a drawer at 2% is not a backup plan.
• Name items so somebody else can act on them. "Dad's blue holdall" is useful to a person who has never seen it. "Bag 3" is not.
• Know how to remove a person. Sharing is revocable from the item's own screen, and it is polite to tidy up after a trip rather than leaving a permanent view of your keys with an ex-colleague.

When the iPhone itself is the problem

If the phone is lost rather than merely absent, work from the iPad or Mac and take the steps in order: mark the iPhone as lost first, because that is the device with your messages on it; then look at your items, because a phone and a bag lost in the same hour were probably lost in the same place.

A tag's Lost Mode does not need your phone to do its job. Once an item is marked lost, a stranger who finds it can hold their phone against it and be shown a way to contact you, routed through Apple so your number stays private. Their device does the work, not yours.

How the Locata Tag behaves across devices

Because the Locata Tag is an MFi certified Find My network accessory, it is registered to your Apple Account rather than to a particular phone. Pair it once on an iPhone or iPad and it appears in the Find My app on every device signed in to that account, with the same last-seen position and the same buttons.

That also means the practical bits carry over. Play Sound works from whichever of your devices is actually near the tag, pushing 80–100 dB out of a speaker you can hear through a cushion or a holdall. Battery status shows up in the item's card, so you can spot a CR2032 due for replacement from the comfort of a laptop rather than discovering it at an airport. It is IP67 rated and 9 mm thick, and it runs up to two years between coin cells.

One boundary that does not move: this is Apple's ecosystem only, iOS 14.5 or later on iPhone and iPad. There is no Android version and no plan for one, so please do not buy it for an Android phone. If you want the rest of the specifications in one place, they are on our FAQ page.

Two tags and two key rings in every box, delivered free anywhere in the UK. have a look.