I've seen this issue in a slightly different context. A few years ago, my Android phone began dying much more quickly than before. Looking at the built-in battery stats, nothing was amiss and there were no apps causing excessive wakeups. It was only when I used Android Battery Historian that I saw there was a ton of bluetooth wakeups caused by Google Play Services.
But why would it be waking up so much? Usually the wake requests originate from some other app, but I didn't see any associated wakeups in the stats dump. After a while I remembered that I installed GasBuddy recently, and a Google search revealed that other people had Bluetooth battery drain issues after installing it. Apparently GasBuddy had an ads SDK that aggressively scanned for Bluetooth beacons. Removing the app stopped the drain.
I was shocked that no battery stats screen showed GasBuddy was the culprit. Even the Battery Historian tool (which requires the user to run a Docker image and dump a bugreport) only hinted that there was some Bluetooth wakeups, but didn't show which app they originated from.
This AirTag seems to be a similar issue, especially if a less experienced user doesn't realized all the "Find My" wakeups are caused by nearby AirTags.
I think Apple needs to make the "deep sleep" states of their devices more strict so they can minimize drain when sitting (both when sitting overnight on a nightstand, or for a week in a living room). Notifications (besides calls) can usually afford to be batched since users are asleep or not nearby. As for AirTags, if one is being carried through an area, there's probably other iDevices that are being actively used nearby. They're already awake and using RF, so they can handle the AirTag ping with virtually no additional power consumption.
I used to work with the Google Play services team at Google. I believe they did eventually fix the battery attribution issue to attribute the usage to the app which used the service, not the service itself.
That could also just be a bug. I remember installing an energy sucking application in 2014 on my Android; I think it was Expensify. I had noticed my battery was draining pretty fast, but then I noticed it took forever to even charge the phone. Upon closer examination, the app was consuming like 65% of all the energy being used. It must have been a bug, as there's no way they would make an app drain the battery that fast on purpose.
LOL a long time ago I had a similar problem with Words With Friends. The app somehow never seemed to sleep. Even when plugged into a 2A charger, my phone would slowly drain.
This was a concern I had since day 0. I have been asking about things like this and been talked down to constantly as if I don't know how bluetooth works...
My other concern was if these are hijacking your data plan. Maybe it's not that significant amount if you have a huge plan but like Ting for example gives you 100MB of data usage each month on their basic plan. That's MEGAbytes. I checked my system clock app for example, and it's using like 500 MB a year of cell data. So the cumulative data it uses per year is about half of that plan's budget.
Settings uses like 1/5 of a month of data. What does settings even use cell data for? Every random app has data usage like this. Sure, you can turn it off but why should that be the user's problem in the first place? We don't live in an opt-out society.
If you're a cargo delivery guy and someone decides to ship 500 airtags for fun that you walk by, are you now just screwed in over charges because Apple decided it was OK to use your cell data for whatever purposes that have no benefit to you?
It does provide a benefit to you. You get to use the Find My network to help locate any missing devices you have and in exchange your devices also work as a node in the Find My network to help other people locate their devices. You can disable this by disabling Find My.
But that's the point OP is trying to make. It's an opt-out feature, and only once you know it's an issue and continuously making sure you're never opted back in.
> My other concern was if these are hijacking your data plan. Maybe it's not that significant amount if you have a huge plan but like Ting for example gives you 100MB of data usage each month on their basic plan. That's MEGAbytes. I checked my system clock app for example, and it's using like 500 MB a year of cell data. So the cumulative data it uses per year is about half of that plan's budget.
I remember just a year or so ago everyone (this is hyperbole obviously) was freaking out at the idea of Amazon's Sidewalk using MEGAbytes of THEIR internet. Its kinda amusing how those concerns are rarely brought up for Apple products.
> Its kinda amusing how those concerns are rarely brought up for Apple products.
It's always brought up with regards to Apple products. Any justified or unjustified controversy surrounding Apple is magnified because of how divisive they are as a company. You're making this remark in a thread dedicated to discussion surrounding this controversy.
100MB is enough to send hundreds of free internet messages such as iMessage or more traditional chat apps which avoids using limited text messages on the plan. That’s a legitimate reason to keep it enabled.
If you don’t use text/call data and can get away with mostly messaging on wifi and then having that the cell connectivity for wife check ins or emergencies at work, this plan costs like $5 a month or something. Compared to a jump to $20 or higher at the next tier. For a lot of people, that’s significant.
Work arounds shouldn’t be a real solution anyway. People can’t restart their computer to solve basic IT problems. Imagine if they had to change their phone settings through multiple layers of menus.
Aside from all or nothing cell data toggle, I’m not even 100% sure if disabling Find My’s data connection stops this situation. It could go through an unknown system service for all I know. Anyhow, I classify this as an essential security app that would be unfairly unreasonable to have to opt out of for this specific use case.
Your paid phone and service just shouldn’t be freely used without your consent to benefit other people while costing you money.
Maybe it’s a nice idea, but that’s not how anything works in the society we currently have.
Edit: also another thought on this topic as a whole… if you’re the only person who goes through a specific area that someone set up with AirTags, wouldn’t that make you personally identifiable when the AirTag owner gets alerted?
You could set these up in a vault for example. Imagine the WiFi signal gets through when it’s open. When the one vault manager comes to complete the alert circuit, you would have the times he’s there or even as a boss you could see if he’s skipping his duty.
I meant shipping activated AirTags as a “prank” or to otherwise cause chaos. People are already shipping individual activated ones to see where they end up.
Or if 500 separate people saw those news stories and each did it individually for legitimate package tracking, perhaps that would be a more believable situation.
>I have been asking about things like this and been talked down to constantly as if I don't know how bluetooth works
I am still unsure how to deal with these people. It would be rude to quote them and name them.
And that is especially true with Modern Apple. I say modern as in those who joined the cult after iPhone. These Apple apologist and fanatics thinks Apple could do no wrong.
There are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth apps on a phone to drain the device batteries.
Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain.
It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
Another thing that's basically a real security hole/opportunity with BLE sniffing is to record the unique IDs of all the BLE devices you can see, along with geo-location data.
Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people.
Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers.
But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.
The government does put Bluetooth trackers all over the place. Cities like to use them for monitoring traffic flows and patterns. But I would not be surprised to find out they do more than just that with the data. Or I would not be surprised if the vendor who makes the hardware also collects and sells that data on top of the tax money they get.
I'm pretty sure this has been done for years and is one of the reasons why the truly paranoid always keep bluetooth turned off.
Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops.
Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
I dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out. It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do.
Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.
The day that I install any amazon sidewalk enabled device in my home is the day I hang up my hat and resign in shame, as a network engineer who's been building internet infrastructure since 1999. It's so gross and wrong.
amazon doesn't get a free ride on my residential internet service or arbitrary use of radio spectrum in my home.
note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc.
just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system. it's already been proven that giving your smart tv the wifi password is a bad idea, because it'll just retrieve and display ads, and/or submit all your usage history to its manufacturer for resale to unknown 3rd parties. Now what if random items of electrical consumer technology phone home whether you want them to or not...
I have a similar feeling and I am quite pessimistic about the future in this regard. Currently, I have been able to avoid it pretty well, but appliances break and need replacing, and I suspect there will be a day where I cannot find a washing machine that isn't "smart", much less a car!
> just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system.
Why bother? They'll iust use your neighbor's wifi (at extra rf pollution cost to your house) or the surveillance system on the streetlamp outside being paid for by your tax money
Personally I benefit from being able to control the type of light and change it over the course of the day, and I've found a couple of uses for automatic switches which improve my life as well.
Point being, these things at least can be liberated from the IoT, where we all know what the S stands for.
Eye opening that your vacuum cleaner or smart bulb wants you to directly embed your WiFi password for set up. Not to mention, usually the cheapest ones are subsidized by, at best sales of your data, and at worst espionage and security backdoors.
> note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc.
Yeah how dare they call them smart when they're such shitty products. Totally inferior quality.
EDIT: Recently I saw a lightbulb that cost $20, you know why? Better light. That's it.
You know what I'd love to buy these days? Jammers for inside the home, just to make sure there is no incidental communication.
I think the cable companies really ushered it in, with their dual SSID setup. I refused to use their gear for a host of reasons, this being one of them.
> note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, ...
If you want a CCTV camera you can still get 'old school' commercial grade IP cameras from eBay. Mercifully free of cloud attachment, but with ftp, email and http notification. Probably will have dynamic DNS, but that can be useful.
I am pro open-source, decentralization, etc, all the things. Still, the value of a network of iDevices with "default on airtag tracking" is just so huge, and if they convince me (and they did) that they handle my data properly (or rather they don't handle it at all), I'm fine with it. Issues like this battery drain are of course unacceptable but I trust that that will be fixed by Apple.
> Still, the value of a network of iDevices with "default on airtag tracking" is just so huge
What kind of value is that? We've been living very well without it for decades and it sounds like that tech is a very powerful enabler of stalkers while providing little value to the average person.
> Issues like this battery drain are of course unacceptable but I trust that that will be fixed by Apple.
How could you fix it? The concept of Airtags is to track every device at all times, which requires active cooperation (and battery usage) from said devices. You could poll devices less often, but the problem would still be here.
> I dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out.
I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable.
> It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do.
You get access to the benefits of this particular mesh network, which lets you locate your Apple devices more reliably than without it.
> Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.
I agree that what mesh networking is being utilized for right now is not really very close to its potential, but there's also not much reason why Amazon or Apple should open their platforms up to third parties at this time. If you want to create something useful with mesh networking you have to sell the idea to the general population. Massive corporations like Apple, Google, or Meta are at a big advantage by having a huge network of users already from which they can push their ideas to the public, but it's a significantly greater challenge for anyone without that resource. Still, I think it could be done.
> I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable.
And people nearby you? Apple is draining your battery for their benefit, using your cellular data for their benefit.
An egregious way internet providers do this now is to not only use your electricity, but also your internet bandwidth and router (!!) to create their so-called hotspot network. Obviously this is opt-out, poorly notified and hidden behind a bunch of dark patterns to disable.
Looking at your Xfinity, coverage across all of SF..
Usually, not. You get the full bandwidth of your DSL line when you need it, the hotspot either only gets what remains (aka is in idle) or has its own PPPoE session that lives outside of your contractual bandwidth limit (obviously that one only works when the line bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you're paying for).
> An egregious way internet providers do this now is to not only use your electricity, but also your internet bandwidth and router (!!) to create their so-called hotspot network.
To be fair, it's not a bad idea... if it was open for everyone (helping out one another) and not just benefiting their customers (helping the company extend its reach). As much as i hate Free ISP here in france, for some time when it was impossible for me to get connected to xDSL (but my neighbor was!) FreeWifi really helped me stay connected to the Internet.
Still, fuck them for calling it FreeWifi (wtf, a corporation is like the exact opposite of freedom). If you're looking for truly free wifi communities, i strongly recommend to check out Freifunk they've been doing that for a long time building OpenWRT images for popular consumer modem/routers in Germany.
IIRC the first ever successful prosecution for "hacking" rested on the
idea of "stealing electricity" (see [1]). This is the prototype of
all hacking laws from which 'compute misuse' laws derive because it
was an indisputable example of loss/harm.
How does this foundational principle not apply to Apple 40 years
later?
> we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home
I didn't realize Apple AirTags were enabling ads for Amazon, or apple was using AirTags to pump ads for Apple, or is this just an exaggeration? Surely we got more mesh network than ones that push ads? I like the ones that help you find lost/stolen things.
An annoyance that is driving me away from the Apple ecosystem is the lack of choice when it comes to these new features - they are forced onto you with no way to disable them and sometimes radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for. I'm still using an iPhone and plan to get the new SE (and only because of Touch ID is back - Face ID was a dealbreaker) but for work I got myself a Thinkpad. Some things are worse, but at the very least I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight because someone at Apple wanted to earn a promotion with a feature that's completely useless to me.
In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching), and yet I have to faff around with that menu constantly because of the next point:
The AirPods auto-switching/roaming introduced in Big Sur made mine completely unusable due to some edge-case bug (even disabling the auto-switching doesn't make them as reliable as they used to be back when they were released, and it takes me 30 seconds of connecting/disconnecting/switching between audio sources upon joining a meeting to actually get it working) forcing me to buy a USB headset. My AirPods are still OK for music on iPhone but became completely useless for meetings even though I bought a second pair just for that reason. - I just can't afford to waste 30 seconds of every meeting gesturing like an idiot while screwing with my audio settings just to get people to finally hear me.
The new "hide my email" feature in Safari now pollutes every email form field with a dropdown that I'll never use, and yet again no way to disable this.
The Find My network can be opted out of in the settings [1]. And if I remember correctly, it asks you to opt in (but I might be remembering wrong)
I have somewhat the opposite opinion though that there are way too many settings in iOS now and it does get difficult to dive through all the menus. Best thing I can recommend is to use the search in the settings.
Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions is an example of a nested settings labyrinth that is somewhat hard to navigate for parents just trying to keep their kids from seeing bad stuff, esp. as it interacts with individual app behaviors. Ex: set TV restrictions to 9+ and the Netflix app entirely vanishes, instead of just filtering its content. Scalable trustworthy content filtering delegation for families seems unsolved.
Seems kind of ridiculous that in order to opt out of Apple's airtag network you essentially have to give up the ability to find your phone if it gets lost.
> sometimes radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for.
This is one of the reasons (along with price) that I try to stick to Apple products that are too old for them to care about. I'd like to see them try to remove functionality from my iBook G4! (Granted, it didn't have as much functionality to begin with, but what it does it's stuck with for now.)
I tend to research purchases extensively before I buy, and it's incredibly frustrating when the manufacturer decides that actually, the product I bought wasn't finished yet, let's have an update to add/change new and exciting features. I chose to buy a specific device with specific features, and if I decide I want new features I'll trade it in for next year's model.
(Incidentally, is it possible to get security updates for Apple devices without getting feature updates? Not for the G4 of course, but my iPad mini keeps asking me to upgrade iOS and I don't want functionality to change.)
> (Incidentally, is it possible to get security updates for Apple devices without getting feature updates? Not for the G4 of course, but my iPad mini keeps asking me to upgrade iOS and I don't want functionality to change.)
re: AirPlay speakers, if you really never want to use AirPlay you can apply a configuration profile that disables it entirely. These are the profiles that allow IT departments to enforce all sorts of policies on employee computers. You could use ProfileCreator to make one: https://github.com/ProfileCreator/ProfileCreator
Increasingly it feels like powerful configuration settings are only available via IT management profiles like these. I use one to enabling full system logging since that’s the only way.
Oh thanks, I'll definitely do that. I use profiles on iOS and am fairly familiar with them but didn't bother checking as I assumed macOS not being so locked down wouldn't have "profile-only" settings.
I'll also use the opportunity to disable Apple News, TV+, widgets and similar bloat I'm not using.
> In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any).
> In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching)
"Accidentally" broadcasting a few times is probably all you need to do to get them to fix their stuff... They probably don't even know.
Vendor lock in means vendor upgrades. The last time I used google maps (maybe 6 years ago?) you couldn't have any history of your recent destinations if you also turned of google search history...
Now I run CalyxOS, haven't used google maps in a long time, and maybe i'm worse for not knowing about speed traps or the fastest route, but... I feel fine.
I believe there is a billboard which even ranks the most annoying tracks every year. I remember Frozen's "Let it go" & James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" were on it too.
Not recommending GP should do it - just found it an interesting fact to add here.
> Some things are worse, but at the very least I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight because someone at
Microsoft are working on fixing this soon
Leave now before turning off secure boot is disabled
> I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight
I feel the opposite. I switched to Pop!_OS a year ago, and had a fairly standard setup. A recent update broke my dock and my launcher and made the whole machine unusable for days. I eventually fixed it, but the dock kept crashing and the launcher was acting wonky, so I've switched back to Mac. I don't like everything about Mac philosophically, but at least It Just Works!
May I ask you why Pop OS! I think there are much more stable distros out there. But sure, you do have to tinker with linux the first time to make sure every hardware is properly supported, but afterwards I have to say it may be the most stable out of all three. I have really nasty software bugs on Mac as well, random process going 99% CPU, slow downs, etc.
Pop!_OS is presently based on gnome a broken mish mash of c and JavaScript and extensions which rather than being written to an actual extension API merely monkey patches the JavaScript.
When the underlying JavaScript to be patched created by gnome changes extensions can silently break.
Outside of gnome land this really isn't at all normal. One could for example have used i3wm without issue for the last 12 years, awesomewm for 14, compiz for 16, KDE for 25 years and if you really hate change there is a fork of KDE 3 so you could have pretended its still 2002 for the last 20 years if you like while still actually making use of current versions of everything from the kernel to your web browser.
I must spend time near hundreds of AirTags each day, yet my battery doesn't seem to be affected. Is it possible somebody is exaggerating? Or omitting relevant info?
Maybe the author is talking about devices that are asleep/off? They mention "weeks" at one point, making me think that the AirTags wake the devices from sleep often, which you'll notice in an iPad that dies after one week instead of a month while sleeping, but not in a phone that you charge every day.
I've actually had exactly this problem with a really old iPad recently. It would last 2-3 months if I never touched it, now it's always dead when I go to reach for it, which is maybe every 2 weeks-ish.
Just assumed the battery hit some sort of cliff but now this article has me wondering if my neighbors got an airtag.
My iPhone barely registers any battery usage by Find My but it hammers my iPad drawing the battery anywhere from 20 to 50% overnight. It’s a very real and very annoying problem.
And we still wonder why misinformation moves so much faster than truth. It has to be some kind of emotional thing. How many people just saw the headline, immediately decided it must be true, and will now be sure to mention it any time someone mentions AirTags in the future.
I doubt this is exactly a new phenomenon, but it sure seems surprising the human race has made it as far as we have successfully.
To be fair, you've fallen into the same trap. One person says they don't have a problem, you believe them and start saying the first statement must be misinformation.
It's possible that both people are correct and the circumstances that cause the battery to drain require being connected to a AirTag, not just near any old AirTag. Or there are other circumstances that cause the battery to drain.
Without more detail, I find the author's observation hard to accept at face value.
The iPad battery usage being shown doesn't account for just the normal "asleep" battery drain, which, if it's not broken out specifically, could be just misleadingly assigning the Find My usage as the main part of it. (as the only thing that had active functions)
It would be better to show what the battery usage/drain is without any airtags nearby and make sure he/she isn't just measuring the normal sleeping usage and inaccurately saying that Airtags caused it.
Things broadcasting on WiFi can drain an iPad. I have some WiFi light bulbs and they are pretty noisy. I had to put my iPads on a separate vlan to keep them from draining in a few days of standby.
My Mac laptops don’t have this issue. I think it’s because they are configured to not awake up on standby unless plugged in.
Now that's an interesting one. I'm glad I haven't run into that. I've got ~50 noisy little wifi switches in my house, but it hasn't affected my iPad battery life. -knock on wood-
I've had this issue too. My iPad pro is generally within 4 foot of an airtag which is attached to my keys. During the day I don't see any real battery drain however during the night it seems to be draining the battery at an accelerated rate.
I'd wake up and check it within the battery info section to see Find My using 90%+ of the battery over the last 24hrs.
I now have a shortcut setup to disable bluetooth on the iPad from midnight > 7am. Find my usage drops all the way down to <2% and battery drain is very minimal - if I leave bluetooth on overnight it jumps all the way back up and drains approx 40-60% of the battery overnight.
Readit News
But why would it be waking up so much? Usually the wake requests originate from some other app, but I didn't see any associated wakeups in the stats dump. After a while I remembered that I installed GasBuddy recently, and a Google search revealed that other people had Bluetooth battery drain issues after installing it. Apparently GasBuddy had an ads SDK that aggressively scanned for Bluetooth beacons. Removing the app stopped the drain.
I was shocked that no battery stats screen showed GasBuddy was the culprit. Even the Battery Historian tool (which requires the user to run a Docker image and dump a bugreport) only hinted that there was some Bluetooth wakeups, but didn't show which app they originated from.
This AirTag seems to be a similar issue, especially if a less experienced user doesn't realized all the "Find My" wakeups are caused by nearby AirTags.
I think Apple needs to make the "deep sleep" states of their devices more strict so they can minimize drain when sitting (both when sitting overnight on a nightstand, or for a week in a living room). Notifications (besides calls) can usually afford to be batched since users are asleep or not nearby. As for AirTags, if one is being carried through an area, there's probably other iDevices that are being actively used nearby. They're already awake and using RF, so they can handle the AirTag ping with virtually no additional power consumption.
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My other concern was if these are hijacking your data plan. Maybe it's not that significant amount if you have a huge plan but like Ting for example gives you 100MB of data usage each month on their basic plan. That's MEGAbytes. I checked my system clock app for example, and it's using like 500 MB a year of cell data. So the cumulative data it uses per year is about half of that plan's budget.
Settings uses like 1/5 of a month of data. What does settings even use cell data for? Every random app has data usage like this. Sure, you can turn it off but why should that be the user's problem in the first place? We don't live in an opt-out society.
If you're a cargo delivery guy and someone decides to ship 500 airtags for fun that you walk by, are you now just screwed in over charges because Apple decided it was OK to use your cell data for whatever purposes that have no benefit to you?
It's a lot less clear that it also means you are no longer a node in the network for other findable targets.
I remember just a year or so ago everyone (this is hyperbole obviously) was freaking out at the idea of Amazon's Sidewalk using MEGAbytes of THEIR internet. Its kinda amusing how those concerns are rarely brought up for Apple products.
It's always brought up with regards to Apple products. Any justified or unjustified controversy surrounding Apple is magnified because of how divisive they are as a company. You're making this remark in a thread dedicated to discussion surrounding this controversy.
If you have 100MB a month it would probably be smart to turn it off until you are ready to check email or whatever and there is no Wi-Fi.
If you don’t use text/call data and can get away with mostly messaging on wifi and then having that the cell connectivity for wife check ins or emergencies at work, this plan costs like $5 a month or something. Compared to a jump to $20 or higher at the next tier. For a lot of people, that’s significant.
Work arounds shouldn’t be a real solution anyway. People can’t restart their computer to solve basic IT problems. Imagine if they had to change their phone settings through multiple layers of menus.
Aside from all or nothing cell data toggle, I’m not even 100% sure if disabling Find My’s data connection stops this situation. It could go through an unknown system service for all I know. Anyhow, I classify this as an essential security app that would be unfairly unreasonable to have to opt out of for this specific use case.
Your paid phone and service just shouldn’t be freely used without your consent to benefit other people while costing you money.
Maybe it’s a nice idea, but that’s not how anything works in the society we currently have.
Edit: also another thought on this topic as a whole… if you’re the only person who goes through a specific area that someone set up with AirTags, wouldn’t that make you personally identifiable when the AirTag owner gets alerted?
You could set these up in a vault for example. Imagine the WiFi signal gets through when it’s open. When the one vault manager comes to complete the alert circuit, you would have the times he’s there or even as a boss you could see if he’s skipping his duty.
There is low data mode and per app opt-in/out
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No because AirTags have to be enabled and registered before they become part of the network. At shipping time their battery is not plugged in.
Or if 500 separate people saw those news stories and each did it individually for legitimate package tracking, perhaps that would be a more believable situation.
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I am still unsure how to deal with these people. It would be rude to quote them and name them.
And that is especially true with Modern Apple. I say modern as in those who joined the cult after iPhone. These Apple apologist and fanatics thinks Apple could do no wrong.
Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain.
It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people.
Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers.
But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.
Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops. Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
Update: now I know exactly which model macbook and iphone my neighbor has, whom I have never met. That doesn't feel right somehow.
Lightblue
nRFConnect
BLE Scanner
Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.
amazon doesn't get a free ride on my residential internet service or arbitrary use of radio spectrum in my home.
note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc.
just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system. it's already been proven that giving your smart tv the wifi password is a bad idea, because it'll just retrieve and display ads, and/or submit all your usage history to its manufacturer for resale to unknown 3rd parties. Now what if random items of electrical consumer technology phone home whether you want them to or not...
Why bother? They'll iust use your neighbor's wifi (at extra rf pollution cost to your house) or the surveillance system on the streetlamp outside being paid for by your tax money
or remove the opt out option from 'your' phone
Personally I benefit from being able to control the type of light and change it over the course of the day, and I've found a couple of uses for automatic switches which improve my life as well.
Point being, these things at least can be liberated from the IoT, where we all know what the S stands for.
Yeah how dare they call them smart when they're such shitty products. Totally inferior quality.
EDIT: Recently I saw a lightbulb that cost $20, you know why? Better light. That's it.
You know what I'd love to buy these days? Jammers for inside the home, just to make sure there is no incidental communication.
If you want a CCTV camera you can still get 'old school' commercial grade IP cameras from eBay. Mercifully free of cloud attachment, but with ftp, email and http notification. Probably will have dynamic DNS, but that can be useful.
What kind of value is that? We've been living very well without it for decades and it sounds like that tech is a very powerful enabler of stalkers while providing little value to the average person.
> Issues like this battery drain are of course unacceptable but I trust that that will be fixed by Apple.
How could you fix it? The concept of Airtags is to track every device at all times, which requires active cooperation (and battery usage) from said devices. You could poll devices less often, but the problem would still be here.
I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable.
> It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do.
You get access to the benefits of this particular mesh network, which lets you locate your Apple devices more reliably than without it.
> Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.
I agree that what mesh networking is being utilized for right now is not really very close to its potential, but there's also not much reason why Amazon or Apple should open their platforms up to third parties at this time. If you want to create something useful with mesh networking you have to sell the idea to the general population. Massive corporations like Apple, Google, or Meta are at a big advantage by having a huge network of users already from which they can push their ideas to the public, but it's a significantly greater challenge for anyone without that resource. Still, I think it could be done.
And people nearby you? Apple is draining your battery for their benefit, using your cellular data for their benefit.
Looking at your Xfinity, coverage across all of SF..
Usually, not. You get the full bandwidth of your DSL line when you need it, the hotspot either only gets what remains (aka is in idle) or has its own PPPoE session that lives outside of your contractual bandwidth limit (obviously that one only works when the line bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you're paying for).
To be fair, it's not a bad idea... if it was open for everyone (helping out one another) and not just benefiting their customers (helping the company extend its reach). As much as i hate Free ISP here in france, for some time when it was impossible for me to get connected to xDSL (but my neighbor was!) FreeWifi really helped me stay connected to the Internet.
Still, fuck them for calling it FreeWifi (wtf, a corporation is like the exact opposite of freedom). If you're looking for truly free wifi communities, i strongly recommend to check out Freifunk they've been doing that for a long time building OpenWRT images for popular consumer modem/routers in Germany.
How does this foundational principle not apply to Apple 40 years later?
[1] The Hacker Crackdown Book - by Bruce Sterling
That's exactly what they're doing
I didn't realize Apple AirTags were enabling ads for Amazon, or apple was using AirTags to pump ads for Apple, or is this just an exaggeration? Surely we got more mesh network than ones that push ads? I like the ones that help you find lost/stolen things.
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In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching), and yet I have to faff around with that menu constantly because of the next point:
The AirPods auto-switching/roaming introduced in Big Sur made mine completely unusable due to some edge-case bug (even disabling the auto-switching doesn't make them as reliable as they used to be back when they were released, and it takes me 30 seconds of connecting/disconnecting/switching between audio sources upon joining a meeting to actually get it working) forcing me to buy a USB headset. My AirPods are still OK for music on iPhone but became completely useless for meetings even though I bought a second pair just for that reason. - I just can't afford to waste 30 seconds of every meeting gesturing like an idiot while screwing with my audio settings just to get people to finally hear me.
The new "hide my email" feature in Safari now pollutes every email form field with a dropdown that I'll never use, and yet again no way to disable this.
I have somewhat the opposite opinion though that there are way too many settings in iOS now and it does get difficult to dive through all the menus. Best thing I can recommend is to use the search in the settings.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/725664/how-to-opt-out-of-apples-fi...
I tend to research purchases extensively before I buy, and it's incredibly frustrating when the manufacturer decides that actually, the product I bought wasn't finished yet, let's have an update to add/change new and exciting features. I chose to buy a specific device with specific features, and if I decide I want new features I'll trade it in for next year's model.
(Incidentally, is it possible to get security updates for Apple devices without getting feature updates? Not for the G4 of course, but my iPad mini keeps asking me to upgrade iOS and I don't want functionality to change.)
No, and then yes, and then no again:
No, if it's older than iOS 14.
And then yes, if it is:
https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/07/apple-will-let-users-stay-on-...
And then no again :-(
https://www.techspot.com/news/93052-apple-stops-issuing-ios-...
Increasingly it feels like powerful configuration settings are only available via IT management profiles like these. I use one to enabling full system logging since that’s the only way.
I'll also use the opportunity to disable Apple News, TV+, widgets and similar bloat I'm not using.
Make it play Rick Astley until they fix it.
"Accidentally" broadcasting a few times is probably all you need to do to get them to fix their stuff... They probably don't even know.
2. "forcing me to buy a USB headset." --> If it has a boom, everybody on the meeting, unknowingly, thanks you :)
The only thing better is an actual VoIP phone (eg Polycom).
Now I run CalyxOS, haven't used google maps in a long time, and maybe i'm worse for not knowing about speed traps or the fastest route, but... I feel fine.
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Microsoft are working on fixing this soon
Leave now before turning off secure boot is disabled
You get less and less control over what you can do with Apple. They run a good PR game but they really like to micro manage so much.
I feel the opposite. I switched to Pop!_OS a year ago, and had a fairly standard setup. A recent update broke my dock and my launcher and made the whole machine unusable for days. I eventually fixed it, but the dock kept crashing and the launcher was acting wonky, so I've switched back to Mac. I don't like everything about Mac philosophically, but at least It Just Works!
When the underlying JavaScript to be patched created by gnome changes extensions can silently break.
Outside of gnome land this really isn't at all normal. One could for example have used i3wm without issue for the last 12 years, awesomewm for 14, compiz for 16, KDE for 25 years and if you really hate change there is a fork of KDE 3 so you could have pretended its still 2002 for the last 20 years if you like while still actually making use of current versions of everything from the kernel to your web browser.
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Just assumed the battery hit some sort of cliff but now this article has me wondering if my neighbors got an airtag.
I doubt this is exactly a new phenomenon, but it sure seems surprising the human race has made it as far as we have successfully.
It's possible that both people are correct and the circumstances that cause the battery to drain require being connected to a AirTag, not just near any old AirTag. Or there are other circumstances that cause the battery to drain.
The iPad battery usage being shown doesn't account for just the normal "asleep" battery drain, which, if it's not broken out specifically, could be just misleadingly assigning the Find My usage as the main part of it. (as the only thing that had active functions)
It would be better to show what the battery usage/drain is without any airtags nearby and make sure he/she isn't just measuring the normal sleeping usage and inaccurately saying that Airtags caused it.
My Mac laptops don’t have this issue. I think it’s because they are configured to not awake up on standby unless plugged in.
I'd wake up and check it within the battery info section to see Find My using 90%+ of the battery over the last 24hrs.
I now have a shortcut setup to disable bluetooth on the iPad from midnight > 7am. Find my usage drops all the way down to <2% and battery drain is very minimal - if I leave bluetooth on overnight it jumps all the way back up and drains approx 40-60% of the battery overnight.
I even have some very rarely used devices where “find my” doesn't show that much usage.
Is this tied to a setting or bug?