If you’ve just purchased the updated Beats Pill from Apple, you’re probably looking for how to turn it off, since Apple oddly left it out of the packaging and user guide. Here’s how:
- Press and hold the Power button for more than 1 second, but less than 3 seconds.
It’s actually 0.8 seconds – that’s according to the aptly-named post “The new Beats Pill is a fantastic speaker with a questionable control scheme” from Mobile Syrup, where author Brad Bennett said this:
One of my main points of contention with the new Pill is how few buttons it has for its plethora of controls. For instance, the power button has six different functions.
- Power on/off (hold for more than 0.8 seconds, but less than three)
- Pairing (press and hold for over three seconds)
- Voice Assistant (double tap)
- Battery status (quick tap, less than 0.8 seconds)
- Change charging direction (triple tap)
- USB-C audio pass through (press and hold button while plugging in USB-C cable)
This is way too much for one button.
That’s not even including the six functions for the center button as well, which the linked story covers.
Further in the same piece, Brad also highlighted the same issue that I found – Apple never actually tells you how to power down your Beats Pill, anywhere. Here he is again talking about the physical manual:
When you unfold it, there are a few quick controls laid out, but it doesn’t even mention how to turn the speaker off, which as I found out, is more complex than it needs to be.
Instructions for how to actually turn off your Beats Pill don’t come in the manual that comes with the speaker, are not in the user guide linked on the QR code that’s on the manual, and are nowhere online except Brad’s article – hence why I’m writing a dedicated piece to help people discover this explicit.
Update: Some folks are talking about it on Reddit, but the solution is only half-correct.
To help further illustrate the power instructions, I created this custom graphic from an amalgamation of the images in the User Guide and SF Symbols.
Also, to illustrate the USB-C instructions, I created this second graphic as well with SF Symbols – Apple probably wouldn’t label this with the Lossless badge or the USB-C image, but I find it helpful for remembering those functions.
Thanks to Brad for the method – check out his full Beats Pill review from Mobile Syrup.
