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10-13-2011, 12:28 PM #1
iCloud now features Find My Mac service
iCloud now features Find My Mac service
Find my iPhone and Find My iPad have been around for awhile via MobileMe, and we've heard dozens of success stories where people used the service to recover lost or stolen iOS devices. Macs have been reliant on third-party solutions or clever hacking to enable the same functionality -- until now.
With iCloud comes Find My Mac, a feature that's essentially identical to what's been offered for iOS devices. If you have a free iCloud account and your Mac is running OS X Lion 10.7.2 or greater, has Wi-Fi access, has a recovery partition installed (more on that later) and has been set up beforehand in the iCloud preferences, you can use Find My Mac to locate your computer anywhere in the world using either iCloud.com or the Find My iPhone app on an iOS device.
Find My Mac is not enabled by default (possibly out of privacy concerns), so once you've met all the relevant prerequisites, go into System Preferences on your Mac, navigate to the iCloud preference pane, and tick the checkbox next to Find My Mac to enable it.
If you've used Find My iPhone before, you'll be familiar with how Find My Mac works. You can locate your device on a map with a fairly reasonable degree of precision, assuming it's connected to Wi-Fi. You can also "ping" it so that a message of your choosing will pop up on screen (along with a very loud sonar sound alert), or you can remote lock or remote wipe the device. Remote wiping the Mac should be a last resort, though, because after you pull that trigger you won't be able to use Find My Mac to locate it. If Find My Mac can't find your device right away, you can even tell the service to send you an email when it does finally locate your Mac. It's all quite slick, and it should bring peace of mind to MacBook Air and Pro owners in particular.
Find My Mac requires your Mac to have a recovery partition installed on it in order for the service to work. If you downloaded OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and did a normal installation, you already have a recovery partition on your Mac, so you don't need to worry about that requirement. But if you're like me and you used a third-party app to clone your Lion installation from an old disk to a new one, you likely missed out on that recovery partition and won't be able to take advantage of Find My Mac until you install one. There are various hacky solutions to this problem, none of them particularly user-friendly, but I found it easiest to simply re-install Lion completely and start fresh.
Since Macs don't have built-in 3G or persistent Wi-Fi when they're asleep (in most cases), iCloud is going to have a harder time locating stolen Macs than iPhones or iPads. It's still a very handy feature, and it significantly increases your chances of recovering a Mac that's mysteriously sprouted legs and gone walkabout.
iCloud now features Find My Mac service originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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10-13-2011, 12:59 PM #2
- Member Since
- Apr 20, 2009
- Location
- Cleveland
- Posts
- 4,083
- Specs:
- 6.1 Mac Pro - 5.1 Mac Pro - 4.1 Mac Pro - 15" MBP - 13" MBP - 17" PB - PM G5 - Apple Watch 42mm
It won't allow me to look up my iPhone's location, and says that the location services on my iPhone aren't enabled, which is false because it is enabled for everything including find my iPhone. Hmmm....
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Marcus Aurelius
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10-13-2011, 05:30 PM #3
- Member Since
- Jan 23, 2008
- Location
- Keller, Texas
- Posts
- 55,273
- Specs:
- 2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 6s+, iPhone 7+, Numerous iPods, High Sierra
Give it time. It looks like the entire system is overloaded with everyone signing on and doing updates. I'm getting all sorts of weird errors with my stuff too.
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10-13-2011, 07:00 PM #4
- Member Since
- Feb 24, 2011
- Location
- Maryland
- Posts
- 3,733
- Specs:
- March 2011 15" MBP 2.3GHz i7 Quad Core 8GB Ram | Mid 2011 27" iMac 3.4 GHz i7 16 GB RAM 2 TB HDD
As soon as all you beta testers get the bugs worked out - I'll update.
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10-13-2011, 07:45 PM #5
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