Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#5

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

olliej wrote: post #3

This seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags. OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D

There could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#6

Post by Asan1 » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

Airtags are fucking terrible anyway. Great idea, awful execution.

Why do my car keys have to start beeping every couple of hours?

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#7

Post by MilaM » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

AFAIK you don't participate in the network when Find My is disabled. Not the best solution, but maybe feasible for devices that are only used at home.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#8

Post by TrainedMonkey » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #4

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 w…

This is partially tongue an cheek, but have you considered playing instructions on how to properly setup security to your neighbors airplay speakers?

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#9

Post by olliej » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #5

olliej wrote: post #3

This seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags. OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D

There could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.

Someone already reversed the exact protocol and proof of concepted a arduino (or pi?) device that could happily use the network and would roll the keys regardless of whether it was in the owners vicinity, defeating the anti-tracking stuff.

Of course at that point you’ve probably spent more than regular gps stalkerware

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#10

Post by duxup » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

Curious, none of my devices seem to be suffering like this with my air tags all over the house.

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?