Apple stuffs a lot of different kinds of tasks into Messages. It’s a junk drawer for communications with other people. Send photos? Sure. Set up a safety partner for when you are going somewhere? Why not. Pay somebody? Of course! And, yeah, let’s stick in a poll!

But I think the best use beyond text and media of Messages is sharing your location. It’s a convenient way to share your whereabouts with someone else or a group, either indefinitely or for a fixed time period. Starting in the version 27 operating systems, you don’t have to use Apple’s preset periods, either: you can set a custom duration, which can be up to 30 days.

Sharing your location in Messages is an extension of Apple’s Find My service and native apps. You can also share your location within a native Find My app—that’s on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch, not iCloud.com’s Find My, which only works with devices.

Like everything with Find My, your current location is locked down except to share with those you explicitly permit, and only for the period you choose, or indefinitely.

Methods of sharing location

Messages offers two different ways to share your location:

• As continuous access: With iMessage, you can let someone see where you are as you move about for one hour, one day, or a custom period (in version 27 releases), or you can add them indefinitely to the list of people who can see your whereabouts in Find My.

• As a pinned location: You can share your current location as a pin on a map, sent as an image preview with a link to Apple Maps. You can send this snapshot using SMS/MMS, RCS, or iMessage.

Starting in the version 27 operating systems, you can also hide your location via Messages (in the Info pane, tap or click Hide My Location) or the Find My app without the other person being notified. They’re also not told when you resume sharing.

Share your location via iMessage

Apple still hasn’t unified how location is shared in Messages across its four platforms, so I have to explain two divergent paths to the same result. (This is a bit overdue for Messages non-text/media features in general!)

Here’s how to share your location on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch in Messages:

1. Select or start a conversation.
2. Tap the plus (+) button and choose Location.
3. A Location view appears at the bottom of the conversation showing a preview of your current location. Tap Share and then tap For One Hour, For Today, Always, or Custom. (These names appear slightly differently in releases before the version 27 operating systems.)
4. If you picked Custom, choose your duration, anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 days, and tap Start Sharing. On an Apple Watch, that starts location sharing; on an iPhone or iPad, proceed to the next step.
5. Tap the Send (up arrow) button to start sharing your location.

A Request button appears if the other person isn’t sharing their location with you. Tap it to request their location.

If you’re already sharing your location with someone, there’s no duration prompt, and the Share button is labeled Send instead. You’re essentially just sending them a reminder with a link they can tap to open Find My.

On a Mac, follow these steps to share your location:

1. Open Messages.
2. Click the profile or profiles at the top of the conversation thread to reveal the Info pane.
3. Click Share My Location.

Where are you?

Apple determines your location from an iPhone, Apple Watch, or iPad, and shows you which device in the Find My app’s Me view under My Location. If you use Messages to offer your location to someone from another device, you’re alerted “Another Device Used for Your Location” and given an option to Cancel or Continue. With iPhone Handoff, which lets two iPhones share one number, your location follows the currently active phone.

After you send your location, the other person or people have access to it. They see a Location card in the conversation that continuously updates to show where you are.

They can tap Open Find My to see you within the Find My app or, if they’re not already sharing their location with you, tap Share My Location to reciprocate.

Likewise, when someone shares their location with you, it appears in the Info pane of any conversation they’re part of. If their current location is known, this tile adds more details; if it can’t be determined, a message says their current location is unknown.

Inset into the location section, you see their current city or landmark, a label showing how recently their location was updated, and a button. The time label appears as minutes or hours, Now (within the last minute or so), or Live (real time). The button shows the walking or driving time; tap or click it to open Maps with directions. Their location updates in real time as they move, which helps if you’re trying to meet up.

You can’t undo sending your current location, but in the Info pane in Messages, in any version of iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, you can tap or click Stop Sharing My Location to cut off the flow of location data.

Apple’s addition of Hide My Location in the version 27 releases lets you silently stop sending your location without alerting the person you’re sharing with. You can also resume from the same spot in the Info pane (or in Find My). The other person only sees your location is unavailable if they check. The reason to add this feature is both to allow privacy or safety, depending on with whom your location is shared. (Abusive partners or controlling family members often force people to enable location sharing.)

Share a pinned location via SMS/MMS or RCS

SMS/MMS and RCS can’t be used to share ongoing location information, but you can send and receive a pinned location with them via Messages, though only on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch:

1. Select or start a conversation.
2. Tap the plus (+) button and choose Location.
3. A Location view appears at the bottom of the conversation showing a preview of your current location. Tap Send Pin.
4. A Location link for Apple Maps appears, labeled Dropped Pin, with your current address below it.
5. Tap the green Send (up arrow) button to send your location.

For further reading

For much more about Find My tracking, location privacy, deflecting stalkers, and AirTags and the Find My network, see my book Take Control of Find My and AirTags. It’s been fully updated for the version 27 releases.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Apple (video, Hacker News, MacRumors, Six Colors):

Apple today announced the next generation of Apple TV 4K, delivering its most immersive home theater experience yet. The new Apple TV 4K features Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence, transforming how users search for, discover, and enjoy their favorite movies and TV shows through a full-screen Siri AI experience. With built-in far-field microphones, Apple TV 4K also lets users talk to Siri completely hands-free.

[…]

The A19 chip in the new Apple TV 4K delivers up to 50 percent faster CPU performance and up to 2x faster GPU performance than the previous generation, for greater responsiveness, faster navigation, and smoother animations. The A19 chip also includes a new, dedicated AV1 decoder, enabling more efficient, high-quality streaming while using less bandwidth.

The new Siri Remote keeps its familiar design while adding Find My support with Precision Finding and an option to play a sound on the remote — making it far easier to locate.

The price is now $299. Apple TV doesn’t get updated very often, so if you need one I guess now is the time to buy.

But I’ve really soured on this product. The software design is worse than when I bought it. I just want a basic interface like the iTunes column browser. Instead, we get all this extra stuff so that the text I care about is secondary, truncated, and obscured. It seems designed to hide the content I want to see, and which I am in the middle of watching, while constantly promoting what Apple wants me to watch. The search has always been bad and is still bad. The main thing it’s supposed to do is play video, and lately that’s been failing, too. It either won’t play at all or it’ll play for a while, and then after a commercial break it will switch to a different episode.

I’m considering just getting a $40 Fire TV Stick to see whether things are any better over there. Maybe the privacy is worse, but I have to weigh that against the product actually working. We watch TV to relax in the evening, and instead I keep getting agitated that either it didn’t work at all or we had to go through hassles like logging in again or rebooting. I would miss the screensaver, though.

Previously:

• HomeView
• HomePod mini 2
• Siri AI Ships (But Still Beta)
• Ads When You Start Your Fire TV
• Apple TV 4K 2022
• An Unsolicited Streaming App Spec
• Apple TV App for Amazon Fire TV

Update (2026-10-14): Joe Rossignol:

Here are 11 changes coming with the new Apple TV[…]

Scott:

Oh, yeah, one more thing: does the $300 Apple TV have a USB C port for UVC cams, for FaceTime/vidconf apps.

If not, why not? Really fucking stupid if it doesn’t, especially at that price. The chipset and OS HAVE the capability.

It does not.

Maynard Handley:

1. There is nothing compelling here for existing owners.

2. The price is so high compared to Roku or Fire that it’s hard to justify telling friends to upgrade for the better experience.

Apple should probably, at the very least, have kept the existing 64GB box at a lower price point, and bundled in a year of Apple TV+, to work with market.

[…]

It’s about “WTF is Apple thinking? Who is this targeted at?” We have three products released today all of which look like flailing.

[…]

I’ve been on team Apple (customer and employee) since 1990. This is the first time (even including the Wired Pray cover days) that I feel genuinely worried that Apple is fumbling the future.

Joe Rosensteel:

I don’t understand the direction the team working on the Apple TV has been given. I know people are excited by it, because they’ve been waiting to buy the best one, and cycle the old ones down to lesser TVs in their homes, but this update is going to be around next year and the year after so it’s worth thinking about it from that point of view. What will you get out of this when it isn’t just “new”? A microphone array? Chip bumps?

Asleep at the jog wheel.

Update (2026-10-16): Andrew Orr:

According to Apple’s footnotes, Precision Finding requires an iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, or iPhone 17 or later, excluding the iPhone 17e. Compatible iPhones must run the latest version of iOS, and availability varies by region.

The restriction is particularly notable because the iPhone 15 lineup and most iPhone 16 models already feature Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip. Those iPhones support expanded Precision Finding with the AirTag 2, but they can’t use the new Siri Remote’s Precision Finding feature.

John Gruber:

I’m sure the graphics and CPU improvements matter for gaming, but the only mention of gaming in Apple’s own Newsroom announcement is this sentence: “With Apple Fitness+, the living room becomes a workout studio, while Apple Arcade and the App Store’s library of games turn it into a home arcade.” I wish it were otherwise, but gaming is such an afterthought on Apple TV that it only garnered the second half of a sentence that started with Fitness+, a service that has only been in the news this year because Mark Gurman says Apple laid off part of the team.

[…]

The elephant in the room, though, is price.

Adam Engst:

You can pre-order a 128 GB fourth-generation Apple TV 4K with Wi-Fi and gigabit Ethernet for $299, and it ships on 13 November 2026. In comparison, the third-generation model started at $129 for 64 GB with Wi-Fi and $149 for 128 GB with added Ethernet. In June, Apple raised those prices to $199 and $249 (see “Apple Raises Prices for Many Products,” 26 June 2026). Apple eliminated the lower-capacity option, so now we have only the higher-end model at twice its initial price.

Jason Snell:

For the people who do care, who do want something better, the options are more limited. Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is $199. Roku’s “Ultra” is $149. The Google TV streamer, my favorite of all the non-Apple products on the market, is $150.

When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.

[…]

I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is a good thing because it “simplifies the product line.”

I don’t follow that argument at all. Having a cheaper product is good, because not only do some people not need Ethernet or large amounts of storage on a streamer box, but lower prices broaden the market!

Update (2026-10-19): John Gruber:

Inflation adjusted, a $69 Apple TV box today would cost a little under $99. Even if we only consider the $99 price in 2015 dollars, that’s about $137 in today’s dollars. Round that up to $150 and it would still be half the price of the only Apple TV hardware Apple now sells: this week’s new 4th-gen Apple TV 4K.

The new Siri Remote, with precision Find My support (and a speaker), is compatible with all prior generations of Apple TV 4K. So if you just want the new remote you can just buy the new remote. But it costs $59, which is almost as much as an entire Apple TV (with remote, of course) did in 2015.

Glenn Fleishman:

I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for inflation. So I charted it.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I was ready to buy three new Apple TVs at the previous price point. At the new price point, I’ve bought zero 🤷‍♂️

John Siracusa says that pause/resume has been broken for him—in Apple’s own TV.app—and that he had to force-quit it several times.