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by audunw
1879 days ago
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I’m assuming AirTags just send out Bluetooth advertising packets. Your phone is continuously listening for those anyway to detect devices you own, like your watch and headphone. So that part is “free”. The power required to process the packet is negligible. Sending the data back to Apple
could be more significant. But I guess that’s only of the AirTag is “lost”, and probably as part of a bundle of data sent regularly anyway, probably when asking Apple servers about new notifications. What takes power is waking up from sleep to send data. If the CPU is already awake, taking a few extra microseconds to transmit a few more bytes of data is nothing. So really, I don’t think the energy and data it’s using is anything to be concerned about. It’s a drop in the bucket. |
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To do that, your phone has to know which AirTags are lost.
A solution might be that Apple periodically sends a list of lost AirTags to phones (possibly as a bloom filter or other inexact, but compact, structure), but I’m not convinced it does. Maybe, it bets on AirTags being rare enough (who’s going to buy tens of them? I wouldn’t, as the idea of having to replace those batteries would put me of buying many) for this not to be a problem.