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Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

annoying.technology

111–120 of 288 posts

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#111
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…

Have you considered blasting them with the most annoying music you can find until they fix it? Deny all culpability of course.

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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#112
post #95

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…

> 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 yea…

> 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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#113
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…

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. [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/725664/how-to-opt-out-of-appl…

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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#114

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 ai…

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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#115

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…

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 th…

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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#116
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…

> 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.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#117
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/725664/how-to-opt-out-of-appl…

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 delegati…

I’m not sure if this an Apple or Netflix issue . Is there an api that Netflix could use to determine if content restriction is enabled ?

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#118
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…

> 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!

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#119
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?

They might never even realize what happened and think the message was automatic

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#120
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…

I just updated from Catalina to Monterey and the airpod switching is magical. Always plays from the device I want.
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