Activating Find My Mac
The old way of finding your MacBook Air consisted of scouring every nook and cranny that you visited before losing the machine and calling up various lost-and-found departments to see if anyone’s turned it in. The new way to find your MacBook Air is a great iCloud feature called Find My Mac. (You can also use this feature through Find My iPhone, an iOS app that you can download to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch through the App Store.) Find My Mac uses known wireless access points and hotspots to locate the computer. You can also use Find My Mac to send a message to the MacBook Air, remotely lock your MacBook Air, and, in a pinch, remotely delete your data. The next few sections provide the details.
To ensure that a thief can’t mess with your MacBook Air, configure OS X to require a password when it wakes from sleep mode. Open System Preferences, click Security & Privacy, click the General tab, and then unlock the preferences. Select the Require password check box, and choose Immediately in the pop-up. You should also select the Disable automatic login check box. Finally, click Advanced and then select the Log out after check box. Use the Log out after pop-up to choose a relatively short timeout period, such as 5 minutes.
As I mentioned, Find My Mac works by using nearby wireless signals to triangulate the MacBook Air’s current position. This triangulation ...
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