Find Serial Number of Stolen iPod

Of course the one night I leave my car unlocked, some punk kid steals my iPod. I call the police to file a report and they ask for a serial number. “It’s on the back of the iPod, I didn’t write it down,” I tell the officer.

No matter what I say, he wants a serial number. I tell him I’ll call him back when I can find it. So off I go to find the box it came in. Since I have two iPod’s, it only makes sense with the kind of day I’m having that I can only find the serial number to the iPod that wasn’t stolen. Back to square one.

Ok, enough of my complaining, you just want to find your serial number! Here are a few quick and easy steps to find the serial number to your lost or stole iPod.

The information we need is located in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPod.plist

To open that file we can use a plist editor or just use the Terminal. If you’ve never used Terminal, beware of commands that begin with “sudo”. Other than that, have fun.

The command to pull out our serial numbers is:

defaults read com.apple.iPod | grep Serial

This will read the plist and display just the serial numbers. Pretty slick ‘eh?

Check out our other iPod Tips.