Apple Exec Says Siri Remote Omits ‘Find My’ Because It Doesn’t Need It (But Is That the Whole Story?)

One of the biggest mysteries among the product announcements at Apple’s Spring Loaded event last month was the conspicuous omission of any kind of “Find My” integration for the new Siri Remote. After all, Apple unveiled its long-awaited AirTags at the same event at which it also revealed the completely redesigned Siri Remote. Yet, despite being announced only minutes apart, there was a distinct lack of any synergy at all between the two products.

Now, an Apple executive has offered up an official reason for why Find My Remote doesn’t exist: It’s completely unnecessary since Apple made the remote thicker.

The specifics comments came from Apple’s VP of product marketing for home and audio, Tim Twerdahl, in a recent interview with MobileSyrup’s Patrick O’Rourke.

O’Rourke asked if Apple had thought of adding “some sort of AirTag-like technology in the Siri remote,” to which Twerdahl responded that it’s just really not necessary with all the other changes Apple has made to the Siri Remote.

With the changes we’ve made to the Siri Remote — including making it a bit thicker so it won’t fall in your couch cushions as much — that need to have all these other network devices find it seems a little bit lower.

Tim Twerdahl, Apple VP of Home and Audio Product Marketing

According to Twerdahl, the thicker aluminum remote is far less likely to fall into your couch cushions, and since you’re unlikely to lose it, there’s no need to have it integrated with Find My.

Twerdahl also adds that the Find My network is “the most powerful out of the home,” implying that it’s not really focused on finding things that are lying around your home.

While that would certainly be true for more traditional tags like Chipolo’s ONE Spot, Apple’s Precision Finding feature and the U1 chip found in AirTags, seems like it was made for locating things in your home, whether that’s your keys or your TV remote.

Is That The Whole Story?

To be fair, Twerdahl is likely doing what all product marketing executives do — putting the best spin possible on the situation, and he doesn’t explicitly say that this was the reason that Apple didn’t include the U1 chip in the new Siri Remote. Rather, he dodges O’Rourke’s question by adding that there doesn’t seem to be as much need for it.

It seems there’s likely more going on here, however, as we heard rumours as far back as last fall that Apple was working on Find My Remote, and some short-lived Siri responses seemed to back up the fact that the feature already exists in some form within Apple’s skunkworks.

While one can make a compelling argument that Find My Remote isn’t really all that necessary — after all, if your remote does slip into the couch cushions, you know it’s somewhere in the couch — it still seems odd that Apple wouldn’t have included it, if for no other reason than to help promote the new Find My network technology. After all, the more products that support Find My, the better the whole ecosystem looks.

In fact, when Apple unveiled the AirTag last month, it actually included a video that showed a person diving into a couch to look for a missing set of keys, with a family of remotes living in the underworld of lost items.

In other words, at least some folks on Apple’s marketing team know that people want to track down lost remotes — even in their couch cushions. However, there’s also the matter of those who may set the remote down somewhere else in the home, or simply have young children who are prone to carrying it off on a new adventure.

So, marketing speak aside, we remain convinced that the real reason that the Siri Remote lacks the U1 chip is simply a matter of Apple’s siloed culture and product development timelines.

Ironically, despite all the rumours around the AirTag, it’s very likely they were considered a top-secret project within the walls of Apple. This means that there’s a good chance that the team working on the Apple TV knew as much about AirTags as we did.

Further, we’ve waited four years to see a new Apple TV, and it’s unlikely that Apple just started working on the new Siri Remote design recently. The hardware specs were likely locked in a year or more ago. Apple may have even originally planned to release the Apple TV last year — we certainly heard enough rumours to this effect — but it was delayed as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

After all, the pandemic even pushed the iPhone 12 back into October and November, and if it was enough to delay Apple’s most important product, a second-string entry like the Apple TV would have ended up getting pushed back even further.

Apple also runs its engineering teams lean and mean, and this is even more true when it comes to secondary and tertiary products. Now that the 2021 Apple TV 4K has shipped, it seems unlikely Apple is going to be in any hurry to revisit the design of the Siri Remote just to add in the U1 chip, but despite Apple’s insistence that it’s an unnecessary feature, we’re not going to be at all surprised to see it when the third-generation Siri Remote arrives someday.