One of the unannounced but highly anticipated features of Mac OS X Lion is the inclusion of a ‘Find My Mac’ service that functions in a similar manner to the ‘Find My iPhone’ service for iOS devices. A Macrumors reader was installing the Developer Preview 3 update and got a dialog box that further supports the rumors that Lion will support a version of the service.
iOS devices use a combination of WiFi triangulation and GPS location to accomplish this but as Macs (currently) don’t have GPS built in they would not be able to locate themselves as accurately. All Macs have WiFi built in however and using that, along with an IP address, could fairly easily locate a Mac.
It’s likely that the Find My Mac feature will include the basic messaging features of the iOS version. It would be really nice to see remote wipe and remote lock options as well. We will most likely find out exactly what shape Find My Mac will take as Steve Jobs formally announces Mac OS X Lion at WWDC 2011.
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