Airpods tips

iOS 12 has a new accessibility feature called Live Listen. It turns your iPhone’s microphone into a sound input and your AirPods into a speaker. After you turn it on, you can put your iPhone in the next room and go to the next room and listen to everything. As long as you’re in the range of AirPods (around 30 feet), you can hear everything. Go to Settings -> Control Center -> Customize Controls and add the Hearing control. Open Control Center and tap on the Hearing toggle. Connect your AirPods and you’ll see them listed here. Tap on the Live Listen option to instantly start hearing through your iPhone microphone.

When you inevitably lose your AirPods, the Find my AirPods feature will come in handy. It’s a sub-feature of Find my iPhone and if you’ve already set it up in the Find my iPhone app, it automatically applies to your AirPods as well. Open the Find my iPhone app and tap on your AirPods to see its location on the map. If the AirPods are charged up and active, you’ll see the location with a green dot. You can navigate to it easily. You can also tap on the Play Sound button to play an increasingly loud sound that will help you spot them. If you’ve lost your AirPods in your house or your room, this is the best way to find them. If you see a Gray dot, it means the AirPods are inactive. The app will still show the last known location of the AirPods and you can go to the place and try to find it manually. We’ve covered how to find lost AirPods in-depth in our guide here.

If you don’t want to open the AirPods case every time you want to check the AirPods battery life, add the Batteries widget to the widgets screen. Navigate to the bottom of the widgets screen and tap on the Edit button to add the Batteries widget. It will now show the battery percentage of all connected devices. If the AirPods are connected to the iPhone, you can even check the battery percentage using your Apple Watch. Open the Control Center and tap on the Battery Percentage button. Below, you’ll see the AirPods battery percentage.

You can pair AirPods with your Mac like any other Bluetooth headphones. And you won’t even have to do that usually. Once you pair AirPods with your iPhone, it will be paired with your Mac automatically if it’s on the same iCloud account. Then to connect to the AirPods, you simply have to open the Bluetooth menu, select the AirPods, and click the Connect button. If you find that this process is iffy and unreliable (it sometimes can be), install the AirBuddy app. It brings iOS-style AirPods pairing process to the Mac. When you flick open the AirPods case next to the Mac, a panel will slide down and you can click on the Connect button to connect the AirPods to the Mac instantly. Download: AirBuddy ($5)