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Apple Removes AirTag Battery Level Indicator From the Find My App
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My dog's AirTag randomly said low battery a few months ago. I looked at it a few minutes later and it was showing full charge. Hiding the indicator isn't going to fix this issue.
Poor design. They need an entirely new team to redesign iOS from the ground up.
I’m not sure they ever truly fixed it. Every iPhone I’ve owned since the 6 has paused while charging, usually at the 9’s.
So 9%, 19%, 29%, you will notice your phone sometimes overheating or becoming warm at percentages like this and they will take a long time to move up in percentage.
Also every phone since the 6 has paused while charging at 33%. Which just happens to be the charge level that spurred the first batterygate, people’s phones would entirely shut off at 31-33%.
Yes it is. Because your AirTag's battery is not faulty. It's just the level reading who is misleading and not accurate. There is no issue.
When you charge your iPhone there is a little chip that counts electrons as they go by and remembers how many electrons went in. Then it counts electrons as they leave and tells you how many are left. That's nice to have.
I will share this plot again because people don't seem to be getting it:
The AirTag batteries are not lithium ion cells, they are lithium primaries and aren't charged through a coulomb counter. That chemistry does not change voltage for most of its useful life. There is no way to tell the remaining capacity by looking at the voltage, especially if you don't control the battery supplier. These batteries can't measure the capacity by counting electrons pushed into the cell. These batteries do not have internal fuel gauges, so you can't query the battery for its internal status.
The only way to know the battery is nearing its end of life is when it crosses the knee and the voltage begins to drop. At this point you have a little bit of capacity remaining to report the end of life status.
The existing battery level was probably Apple's best effort to make an educated guess about the remaining capacity. I'm guessing they tested hundreds or thousands of batteries and established some kludgy heuristic that they had enough confidence in to work and enough faith in humanity to think they'd be willing to accept imperfect results. Then they shipped millions of AirTags to jokers like us and we started digging old coin cells out of drawer bottoms and under car seats and pulling them out of one thing to put them in another or buying them from the gas stations in whatever countries we all happen to live in and some of us were getting wildly inaccurate readings. Inaccurate to the point that we though there was plenty of remaining life until suddenly there was none. Apple decided that was unacceptable and the only way to avoid misleading the user was to remove the indicator.
Buy high quality batteries and change them once a year like we do for our smoke detectors. If you forget, like we all do with our smoke detectors, or use an unreliable battery then FindMy will wake you up in the middle of the night with a notification that the battery in your tag is low, just like our smoke detectors do.
One of my vetted sources told me that the people in question were MR forum members.
That’s because your battery has aged to the point where it can’t reliably separate charge to create a voltage potential across the terminals when it is loaded and current is flowing into the circuit. But when you disconnect it it is an open circuit and has a chance to catch up and separate some charge. It is basically as if you had a source resistor in series with the battery. The voltage delivered to the load will decrease as the source resistance increases.
BECAUSE, regardless of the reality of the situation, the world is WAITING for my hot take. I’m not going to NOT do my hot take just because of logic facts or reason. Have you any IDEA how many likes I get for my hot takes?
SOME!!! SOME is how many I get. So unless you’ve got anything better than some likes, I suggest you take your commonsensicalness elsewhere.
The AirPods try to not be used to track people through the radio broadcasts (Without authorization).
they basically look like different hardware every few minutes
but because of the way Bluetooth shares battery info it broadcasts 88%, 88%, 88%…
The AirTags are using standard cell batteries instead of sealed proprietary batteries. Most people think that is a good thing but the downside is that those battteries don’t have charge management circuitry in them. That makes it hard to get an accurate read on their charge levels. Any reading is an approximation. Until the voltage starts to drop and then they give a low battery notice.
Did you read any of the dozens of comments explaining why they are likely doing this?
Except my phone sent me a message about 4 months ago that the battery of one of my AirTags needed to be replaced. It showed red battery level. It was weird because I had had the AirTag for just a few months and same number of months as another AirTag that showed full charge.
I was about to swap the battery when I decided to keep the old battery in the AirTag and close the cover. Suddenly the phone showed full charge for the AirTag. I was expecting to get the battery low message just a few days later, but no.... didn't see it again for another 4 months. Did the same trick last week, and here's the battery showing 4/5 full.
So I don't have an issue with the indicator, I have an issue with the warning which is based on the indicator (obviously).
All of this to say that, Apple, removing the battery level indicator IS NOT GOING TO FIX THE PROBLEM of fake warnings.
It's nearly impossible to give an accurate reading of this kind of battery. And yes this indeed also goes for "low battery" warnings. This is why normal Quartz watches don't have battery indicators. And yes they (these batteries) can be very unreliable as well. So I can see why Apple did this.
Perhaps, perhaps not. They may have also tweaked the threshold at which they trigger a low battery warning and that might be easier if they don't need to harmonize it with an analog fuel gauge.
It may not reduce the number of false alarms, but it will reduce the number of times you look at the battery level and think "it's still half full" only to have it go flat tomorrow. The discharge curve is flat until end of life. There is no way to tell the difference between full, half empty and three quarters empty-- which means you can put a 3/4 empty battery into the tag and Apple may very likely call it full because they assume you installed a fresh battery.
Didn't the same exact thing happen to MacOS "remaining time on battery" information? One day it just disappeared.
That’s constructive.
Yes, eyes sound more badass that way.
So count hours on?
You would rather that they show inaccurate battery charge levels?
Or should they switch to proprietary, non-removable batteries so that they could get a more accurate level reading? Screw using standard, replaceable batteries. /s
Not for me, these things have been amazing and at such a low price. If you fly a lot and wonder where your luggage is (or isn't) these little wonders have been a godsend. Or if you fly drones or model airplanes that occasionally lose comms with their controller.
Zero regrets here.
Naturally, I too spat out some objections when I read where the battery feature had been removed. After speaking about this to a colleague who is an electrical engineer, I now have some basic understanding of the challenges in predicting battery strength and why Apple has removed that feature.