AirTags aren’t updating equally across all my devices

Your observations are right on point: it’s not a network issue, but rather a delay or breakdown in iCloud location state propagation or Find My service caching.

A little background: iCloud updates Find My data asynchronously across devices, and sometimes macOS lags behind, especially if the Mac has been idle or backgrounding the Find My process. macOS uses more aggressive caching than iOS, which often leads to stale data being displayed in the Find My app until the background daemon (or a manual refresh) syncs things up.

Bluetooth presence and U1 chip data (Precision Finding) are only generated or prioritized on iPhones and iPads. macOS doesn’t participate in the Ultra-Wideband proximity network the same way, so you’ll often see delayed updates until the Mac gets fresh data from iCloud.

Find My on macOS lacks the “pull-to-refresh” capability that iOS has, so if your iPhone updates instantly but your Mac doesn’t, it’s often just waiting for a push from Apple’s servers.

By rebooting those actions forcibly reset the cached data and background daemons. One soft workaround you can try without rebooting: open Activity Monitor, search for the FindMy process, force quit it, and reopen Find My — this usually nudges macOS to fetch fresh data.

Two things:

1. If you need real-time tracking, then you should use a device that relies on GPS, not Bluetooth, &
2. You can let Apple know here: Product Feedback - Apple