A 10-Year Battery for AirTag
https://www.elevationlab.com/blogs/news/introducing-timecapsuleWhy didn't they replace the battery when the app complained?
How long would a thief really keep the AirTag anyway?
If the thief did keep the AirTag and you tracked them down, then what? A confrontation has a fairly high chance to have a worse result than losing some equipment. You could try to get the police to do it, but that's going to take more time, during which the thief is even more likely to ditch the AirTag.
Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device. They're really for something lost, not stolen. Generally, they are specifically designed to not work well in adversarial situations.
Worst case scenario I report it to police directly and it tells them exactly where it is.
If something is stolen, if I don't know where it is that makes the problem 10x worse. At the very least the airtag shows where that item is (unless it has been found and thrown away).
During the most recent American election I saw at least three news stories on television about campaign sign thieves being tracked down through the use of AirTags put in one of the signs. To my surprise, in each case the police were right there, and in two of the cases, the signs were still loaded in the thieves' cars. So it does seem to work.
Anyway, you're really swimming upstream trying to think of aigtags as an antitheft device.
They aren't anti-theft devices as in padlocks. But the more often that thieves start wondering if the thing they're taking might have an AirTag in it, they might start reconsidering some of the petty thefts.
It's like a surveillance camera. A camera, itself, can't stop a crime. But the possibility that someone's watching can act as a mild deterrent.
I do wonder though: Do AA batteries actually have a shelf life of 10 years even without supplying any current?
This is another case of bad UX by a company praised for its great "product design skills".