AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks

> It's hilarious to a certain extent that they built the thing smaller than all the competition and bulk it up with a wad of leather anyhow.

That's essentially how I feel when I see the "Our thinnest iPhone ever" slide knowing that 95% of iPhone owners put it in a bulky case. That said, that's not unique to Apple and the phone is at least usable without a case.

People debate if Apple is about primarily hardware or software but I posit their forte is marketing. They make good products but also consistently beat out superior competition by engineering desirability.

A little off-topic, but can an artistic person or graphic designer help me to understand why every airtag in Apple's literature with the Apple logo has that two-color (light gray, dark gray) scheme with a not-exactly-straight line dividing the colors [1]? It seems like an odd design choice.

EDIT: Ha! Thanks for the push. I would have never seen it. My eyes are broken I guess. It truly looks to me like they are two-toned gray, even after the explanation.

1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/accessories/st...

Sheesh, those are costly. $35 usd is more than two weeks worth of groceries, two months of a world of Warcraft subscription, and about the same price as any of Affinity's products. For the AirTag, I'd admit that it seems sophisticated enough to warrant it. But the loop to affix it!?

Apple’s unique ethos is technology as a means for creative expression. That’s why they’ve excelled in font rendering, colour accuracy, sound fidelity, and input-lag.

I think this value came from Steve Jobs, and I hope they never lose it because it imbues Apple with real human spirit. They’re more than just another profit-seeking company.

It will also make them better hidden microphones :) http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/eaves_dropping.aspx

Is the magnet strong enough to stick the tag to ferromagnetic metals?

The AirTag transmits every 2 seconds. The iPhone should scan every 2 minutes for 2 seconds in order to capture the AirTag. BLE scanning costs about ~20mW. So the average power consumption is 20mW * (2sec / 120sec) = 0.3mW.

Over an entire day, it's 7mWh. The iPhone 12 battery is 10000mWh.

Conclusion: it's neglibile.

> Communication with the Find My network is end-to-end encrypted so that only the owner of a device has access to its location data, and no one, including Apple, knows the identity or location of any device that helped find it.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-introduces-airt...

In case you care about details: https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/security/sec60fd770ba/... https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/security/secd4ab33e5c/...

I'm not sure how the e2ee works out when using Find My in the browser, but that's a different topic, I guess.

edit:

> This entire interaction is end-to-end encrypted, anonymous, and designed to be battery and data efficient, so there is minimal impact on battery life mobile data plan usage and user privacy is protected.

https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...

Are the iPhones always tracking and reporting? Or are they just watching passively for the devices reported lost and only reporting the location to Apple of your own AirTags. The latter seems far more sensible. The battery cost of this is fairly trivial. Your phone is already capturing its location and reporting for FindMy. The incremental cost of attaching the AirTag’s location is minimal. To monitor BLE for a bunch of addresses is also minimal cost that’s typically predominantly done within the BT chip to avoid waking the SoC. At first glance there are some details that are unclear here in terms of how they scale this. For example, at Apple scale, the total size of lost AirTags is quite large, larger than what you can typically offload to a BLE chip. Similarly, the privacy protection features mean that BLE addresses rotate so just passively scanning wouldn’t be sufficient. My bet though is that that’s the work that was done - offloading all of this to the BLE chip in ways that are friendly to the HW capabilities. It’s also entirely possible they worked with their BT supplier to add the necessary low-level hooks to make that perform well and preserve privacy.

I would say those AirTags will be with the iPhones of their respective owners. Mine report as “With you” so perhaps they don’t advertise themselves in this state. The phone will be frequently updating its own location to Find My anyway so no extra power draw.

However if you’re walking by a set of left luggage lockers or through some similar environment where lots of AirTags not with their owner then there would indeed be some overhead. If you work in baggage handling in an airport would probably be telling. This all depends on the frequency which the AirTag reports itself and the frequency where your iPhone listens out. I suspect the impact would be negligible considering the power draw of the U1 in the AirTag is of order the power draw that the phone must commit.

More like two sides of the same AirTag.

I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that their guiding principle with this was as it is with every other portable device they have now - make it as small as practically possible and let people extend it if and how they want[1] to.

Saves a little bit of material, makes manufacturing a little less complicated, and makes the accessory ecosystem a whole lot more appealing.

1. I don’t carry a keychain, for example, but I’ll slip one in each of my bags.

Beside the size it's probably a tradeoff on mechanical integrity: a keyring can introduce immense mechanical stress. On my last tag the small loophole just broke away after a year on a key that was not used daily or in harsh environments. With the AirTag you can just replace a $2 third party accessory. Apple didn't have to engineer a very durable (maybe milled?) loophole, which would have increased cost.

While ifixit did drill a hole, we have no way of knowing how durable that hole will be. The drill point looked pretty close to the edge, simple fatigue may snap the hole quite quickly.

Because it's not going to be $13, you'll surely be able to buy 5 for $6 off Amazon soon for whatever kind of holder-with-loophole you want.

People love customizing their things. Some people will need large holes, other tiny ones, depending on what they're attaching it to. Some will want to make their AirTag bigger and bulkier, others not.

In this case I think Apple made the absolutely right decision.

The ifixit folks are really good at getting people invested in understanding what’s going on inside our gadgets. A little bit of humour like this is especially fun.

Just saw a show about this, it seems that children, even at ages of 9, have a tendency to put small stuff in their mouths and/or nasal cavities (even as part of playing, to 'hide' it, etc.) If this is done with a button battery, it can cause lasting damage within hours (e.g. two hours). Please be careful, found guidelines in here: https://www.rch.org.au/kidsinfo/fact_sheets/Safety_Button_ba... https://www.health.qld.gov.au/news-events/news/button-batter...

Btw, would swallowing the AirTag whole be just as dangerous? They're water resistant, but I'm assuming that they won't stay sealed in stomach conditions.