It’s not 100mA every few minutes, it’s 100mA when calibrating from scratch with no satellites known.
I looked it up and the consumption when in normal use is around 30mA, which would mean that, say, if it took 10 seconds (probably a lot more than needed if you’re not travelling) every 5 minutes - which adds up to 120 seconds @ 30mA per hour - that would consume 1mA/h (PS: by pure absolute chance my numbers ended yielding a result of 1 ;)), which is 0.025% of that battery per hour. If you’re lucky, in the phone screen were one would be visualizing the graph for the battery power charge over time that would make the line fall 1 pixel.
It really is a whole other world out there in the embedded and low power systems domain.
In order to not “start from scratch”, though, you will need to save some state persistently about your location (and the location of the satellites), which will cost power. Then you go in a building and lose all your signal, while still burning power to maintain that old state.
If it was that easy and cheap in terms of power, AirTags would have GPS receivers. They don’t.
Flash memory preserves data without using any power at all. Ditto EEPROM. Both present in even the most basic of embedded processing cores (and the GPS protocol is implemented on those)
You need to move quite the distance for a GPS device to need to change just one satellite, much less all 3 and it doesn’t matter if you’ve been underground or not as the thing will just try first the ones in its memory and unless you travelled hundreds of km underground, it’s still going to be the same 3 satellites.
Last but not least, AirTags use CR2032 batteries with a capacity of around 200mA/h - 1/20th of a mobile phone one - and that charge is supposed to last for years between battery changes, not a mere few days until the next time the phone is charged. The power consumption of an AirTag must be thousands or even tens of thousands of times lower than what we’ve been talking about, in the order of nano-amperes not tens of milliamperes.
You’re clearly clinging on to that pre-conception of yours for reasons other than logic, and you keep on inventing wild theories based on zero domain knowledge, to try and justify that beloved pre-conception of your, so I’ll leave you to it since this feels like trying to explain that the Earth is roughly spherical to a Flat Earth believer.
You seem to be the one going through mental gymastics to justify why the button might not just turn the thing off. Sometimes they’re not out to get you, you know.
These phones cram oodles of stuff into a tiny space at super low margins , and are perfectly good at spying on their users when turned on. There’s no reason for them to spend any extra effort to spy when they’re turned off, for the .01% of people who turn their phones off regularly.
The margins aren’t as low as I thought, but they still aren’t giving any money away on their BOMs…
