Find your Stolen iPod or iPhone Serial Number in iTunes 9 on a Mac

Do you need to find your stolen iPod or iPhone Serial Number within your Mac?  If your reading this its a good chance that you have had your iPod or iPhone stolen.   That sucks, sorry.   So now you need to retrieve your serial number from your Mac so you can report it to the police and post it on Stolen 911.  If you have not noted the iPod or iPhone serial number somewhere else or kept the original packaging, you should be able to retrieve it in iTunes 9 or your Mac’s OS.

iTunes 9 – Lets try the simple one first

As long as your iPod or iPhone has been connected to your Mac iTunes library before, this should work for the last connected devices.

• Click on iTunes> About iTunes.
• As the iTunes version information scrolls, you will the see the serial number of the last connected iPod as well as the last connected iPhone’s serial number and IMEI.
• Hold down the Space bar to pause the scrolling.
• Hold down the Option key  to reverse the scrolling.

iTunes 9, again – Now try this to get a list of all backed up devices and serial numbers.

In our fist try we only got to see the serial number of last devices connected.  If your iTunes manages several iPhones or iPods you may need to try something else.

• Open iTunes 9 and click on “Preferences”.
• A window will then pop up with several choices and icons listed across the top.  Click on “Devices”.  You should see a list of “Device Backups” last performed by iTunes.
• Place you cursor over the name of the device, like a listed iPhone.  After a brief second, a yellow window will appear.
• In the case of an iPhone this window will display the phone number, the IMEI and the serial number.  If you have more that one iPhone, the information for each one will be listed.

I tried the above method on my older 60 gig video iPod, but it did not list the device as a recent backup in iTunes 9. (Even though I had just completed one.)

In the Mac OS – If all else fails, this will work.

Using this method you can retrieve all of your past connected iPhones and iPods.  Its just a little harder.

• Open Finder and click on you Main Drive.
• Choose Users
• Choose your user name.  (or whatever you call yourself)
• Choose the Library folder
• Choose the Preferences folder
• Choose and open the “com.apple.ipod.plist” file

Toward the end of all the gibberish, you’ll find something along the lines of this:

iPod&*$%^#>[YM740ERCYXX#$^33A«ùnƒˆ#^U1.1.2Ú&$@*
!”##^*$3A«¡ì LaØ[YM616KDHSZB&%$1€((&%$$U1.3.1DÄqø*^-2EXq~’¥¸

I have highlighted the serial numbers in blue.

The serial numbers appear just after a left bracket symbol, so the above mess translates into serial nos. YM740ERCYXX (most recent) and YM616KDHSZB (older).

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Category: Find Your Serial # in iTunes, In Leapord, Snow Leapord, Tracking an iPhone