Why can't I locate my iPhone even if its dead?

Even when the phone is "Off", Bluetooth is still active on the phone, assuming that Find My and Find My Network have been enabled.

That's how Apple can make good on their Find My claim that the phone can still be found even if it is "Off".

Now, if the battery has run down to zero and the battery is "all dead", that is a different matter.

But the battery may only be "mostly dead". That's different from being "all dead", since "mostly dead" is "slightly alive".

Apologies to The Princess Bride.

Bob Timmons wrote:

Even when the phone is "Off", Bluetooth is still active on the phone, assuming that Find My and Find My Network have been enabled.

That's how Apple can make good on their Find My claim that the phone can still be found even if it is "Off".

Now, if the battery has run down to zero and the battery is "all dead", that is a different matter.

But the battery may only be "mostly dead". That's different from being "all dead", since "mostly dead" is "slightly alive".

Apologies to The Princess Bride.

I've seen it where an iPhone went to auto shutdown but would still show a battery low condition on the display. So obviously that was “mostly dead”, with apologies to Miracle Max. I wasn’t aware that it could do anything beyond that.

y_p_w wrote:

I've seen it where an iPhone went to auto shutdown but would still show a battery low condition on the display. So obviously that was “mostly dead”, with apologies to Miracle Max. I wasn’t aware that it could do anything beyond that.

There are two things going on:

• When the battery gets low it will shut down with some energy left to protect the battery, because a Lithium Ion battery that goes complete flat will not recover, and may need to be replaced. So when it does shut down it should be charged within a few hours ideally, or certainly a day, to avoid the possibility of it draining completely.
• With later model phones and iOS versions Apple has implemented a feature called Find My Network. When the phone is powered off (or has shut off due to low battery) the Bluetooth circuit stays on, and if it detects any nearby iPhones it will “ping” them to say “I’m here”. The pinged phone will notify Apple’s Find My server that a phone has been detected, and the location of the finding phone will register in the lost iPhone owner’s Find My app on another device or in iCloud Find. This essentially makes the phone behave like an AirTag (or a Tile).

The Bluetooth remains active for 24 hours after the phone shuts down, so this “crowd sourced” service can work for a day.

It needs to be on. There's no other way to track the location of a device unless maybe a tracker (like an AirTag) is attached to it.

🤣