Apple Has Made It Easier To Find A Lost Siri Remote

When tvOS 17 arrives later in the year, it will bring with it a number of upgrades and improvements to the Apple TV user experience, including the ability to more easily find a lost Siri Remote.

One of the benefits of Apple’s ecosystem is that finding a lost device is usually fairly straightforward. Apple’s Find My network has evolved so much over the years that it is now even possible to track and locate an Apple device when it’s offline.

Adding to Apple’s ability to find things, an iPhone can now be used to locate a lost Siri Remote, providing the Apple TV remote is nearby. Unlike Apple’s other Find My features, Locate Siri Remote is not available inside the Find My app. Instead, it is accessed by launching the Apple TV remote inside the Control Center on the iPhone.

Once launched, the iPhone will then guide the user to the remote using an onscreen circle that grows in size as the user gets physically closer to the remote.

While Apple didn’t go into specifics on how this works, we suspect that it is highly reliant on leveraging Apple’s Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology. Apple introduced UWB a couple of years ago as a location-tracking technology and most people will know it as part of the suite of features that power AirTags.

While Apple can locate devices using different types of connections, including cellular, Wi-Fi, and even other iPhones, one of the big selling points with UWB is how sensitive it is, resulting in a much more precise level of tracking. Essentially, UWB is the difference between knowing where something roughly is and where something exactly is.

Considering a lost remote is something that will require more precise locating when it has fallen down the back of the sofa, it does seem highly likely that Apple is using UWB to facilitate Locate Siri Remote.

This also likely means that finding a lost Siri Remote in this way will require an iPhone that’s equipped with a UWB chipset. In other words, an iPhone 11 or newer.

If Apple is utilizing UWB to power Locate Siri Remote, this also could mean that the remote-finding feature eventually rolls out to other UWB-enabled devices in the future, such as newer Apple Watch models.