Rachel Kroll
Just a hair over 10 years ago, I wrote a post lamenting the fact that my WiFi-only original iPad (which was new at the time) was probably a mistake. After all, if I took it outside my house and away from the one wireless network it knew, it was now cut off from the Internet. If someone stole it or if I left it behind somewhere, there would be no way to track it down or wipe it.
Well, times change, and now that's no longer a concern. Pretty much anything that Apple sells nowadays that is intended to be portable is also trackable, even if it's "off" (whatever that even means now). Obviously I'm talking about AirTags, but the phones, watches, iPads, and yes, even laptops have the ability to be found in the same way if they are new enough.
When I thought about this at the time, I figured maybe they'd do some kind of one-way wifi and satellite-based "push" system where you could send "kill signals" for stolen devices. Yeah, that was a pretty bad call. It didn't end up even close to that. Instead, now, just every other Apple device in the vicinity has the ability to hear a beacon from a missing device and report about where it was found.
That plus the whole activation lock thing where a device won't let you use it unless the previous owner releases it from their iCloud account hopefully put a pretty big dent in the utility of stealing these things. Even with that, you still hear about people knocking over Apple stores and stealing armloads of devices for some reason. It must be for the non-serialized parts, since the rest of them will surely tattle if they are ever connected to the "mothership" again.
Looking at it another way, I no longer worry about this kind of thing. It's as if they saw something that might keep people from wanting to buy a certain class of device and then did something about it. How about that?