Does the macOS Find My cache still show location history?

No. For years you could read a local cache file on a Mac running Find My and recover a short window of recent AirTag reports. That stopped working with macOS Tahoe. The cache is no longer written in a form anyone can read back. It was never a real history anyway, and the only thing that replaces it is recording reports forward from today.

What was the Find My cache trick?

A Mac signed in to your Apple ID with Find My open kept a working copy of what it knew about your items on disk, under ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.findmy.fmipcore. People opened that file, found location reports with coordinates and timestamps in it, and realised the Mac was briefly holding something the app itself would never show them.

From there it became a small cottage industry: shell one-liners, Python scripts, Shortcuts recipes, a few menu-bar apps. All of them did the same thing: copy the cache before macOS overwrote it, pull out the coordinates, and stitch the results into something resembling a trail.

It was a scrape, not an API. Nobody at Apple published that file's format, promised it would stay put, or intended it to be read by anything other than Find My.

Why did people rely on it?

Because it was the only thing there. Find My shows one pin and overwrites it, so the cache was the sole place an ordinary user could see any location other than the current one, and seeing two locations feels like an enormous upgrade over seeing one.

• It cost nothing and needed no account anywhere else.
• It used the Mac you already had, with the Apple ID already signed in.
• It sometimes covered the gap you cared about, if you thought to look in time.
• It felt like a clever workaround rather than a product you had to trust.

That last point mattered more than people admit. The data never left the machine, which made it an easy thing to recommend to somebody who did not want a third party involved at all.

What changed with macOS Tahoe?

The cache is no longer written in a form anyone can read back. The scripts still run, and they still find something where the file used to be. They just no longer produce coordinates. There is nothing to reconstruct a route from on a current version of macOS.

Apple did not announce this as a change, because from Apple's point of view nothing was taken away. A private cache format was never a documented interface, so tightening it is housekeeping rather than a removal. The people who lose out are the ones who had quietly built a workflow on top of it.

If you find a guide telling you to open com.apple.findmy.fmipcore and parse the JSON inside, it predates Tahoe. Some of those guides are still ranking, still confidently written, and no longer true.

Why was it never a real location history?

Even at its best it was fragile in four separate ways, and each one bit somebody at the moment they needed it most.

• Local only: the history existed on one Mac, so it was gone if that Mac was asleep, shut, travelling with you, or reinstalled.
• Partial: it held only what that particular Mac happened to have synced while Find My was open, not everything the network reported.
• Short: it was a small rolling window that overwrote itself, so checking a week later showed you nothing about the week.
• Undocumented: the format could change in any macOS update without warning, which is precisely what eventually happened.

The failure mode was always the same. Somebody's shipment goes missing, they remember reading about the cache, they go looking, and the window they needed rolled over days ago. A history you have to think of in advance is not much of a safety net, and this one still required you to think of it in advance.

What replaces it now?

Recording forward. Nothing stores your AirTag's past for you: not Apple, not the tag, and no longer the Mac. So the only route that will exist tomorrow is one something started saving today.

AirTag History does the boring part: it polls the Find My network every 5 minutes and saves each report it gets back with latitude, longitude, and timestamp. Those points become a map you can scrub through and a file you can hand to a mover or an insurer.

The same catch applies as ever, and it is ours to state plainly: history starts when you connect. If your container shipped last month, that month is unrecoverable by any method. The cache trick would not have saved you either, because it never held a month.