A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

I know this is useful (for something), but I'm stuck on the plot holes in the motivating story...

Why 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.

It only complains once that the battery is low and never again, I've run into a dead battery when searching for an AirTag multiple times.

This has not been my experience. I’ve had multiple AirTags notify me multiple times over a period of months that I needed to change the batteries.

So last week my keys AirTag was dead, and I checked my notifications and I only received one notification in October that it had a low battery, but to be fair, I don't know exactly when it died between October and last week.

Maybe my batteries die completely before the second notification triggers.

How do you check historic notifications?

I never dismiss them, so there's a huge pile on my phone.