Apple is all about privacy and security, and as you may know, the company released a deeper Find My integration for AirPods in October last year. However, this change seems to affect pretty severely companies that refurbish AirPods, reports 9to5Mac.
Refurbishers stop working with AirPods because many are still linked to their owner’s Apple ID
A recent report from Insider shows how a refurbisher working with Walmart and other retailers has seen himself stockpiling more than 30,000 AirPods sets over the course of just a few weeks, because of the new way that AirPods are integrated into the Find My network. More specifically, the issue is related to the Find My application. For those of you who don’t know, Apple recently released a new firmware update to some AirPods models, which enabled them to support the Find My network. Before that update, AirPods were not connected to the Find My network. And now, when a customer returns or trades in a set of AirPods, they often forget to unlink their AirPods from their Apple ID. Pretty much this means when the refurbisher tests the earbuds, or sometimes even when the new buyer gets them, they receive an “AirPods Mismatch” message in the Find My app on their iPhone.
The message indicates that the AirPods are linked to a different Apple ID, and suggests there was a mix-up with someone else’s AirPods, pretty much instructing the affected user to go to a support article to resolve the issue.
Unfortunately, though, the support article that this message leads to is most likely not going to be helpful in the situation that the user just bought refurbished earbuds.
The company we mentioned above, goTRG, is a firm that handles returns for Walmart and other retailers. According to them, eight in ten AirPods that are processed by the company’s six facilities have the issue… yeah, as you can see, that’s a lot of AirPods that cannot be sold again.
R2Cell is another company that was affected by the situation. The firm sells refurbished electronics on Amazon, eBay, and other websites, and it has stopped refurbishing and selling AirPods entirely. R2Cell CEO Sunny Mohammad stated they stopped refurbishing Apple’s earbuds when they discovered the issue back in December. He added that AirPods are quite difficult to refurbish also because they have many small parts that easily get damaged.
Reportedly, the affected refurbisher companies have reached out to Apple but have not received a response. Pretty much, the issue can be solved only if the original owner of the AirPods unlinks the product from their Apple ID before selling it. As you can imagine, that would be pretty hard (if not impossible) to do with all the AirPods that are already in some of those refurbisher facilities.
On top of that, if the AirPods are not factory reset, the buyer will have a message that the owner of the earbuds will be able to see their location.
