Yeah that's kind of what I was alluding to in the last line. Was mostly responding to the idea that "it won't take that long to find".

With a bit of creativity they can be made pretty hard to find. At least hard enough that they're no longer the weak link at all.

The next step would be trying to make it more integral to whatever thing you're trying to track. If you disassemble an air tag and hide it inside your laptop, no thief is gonna pull out some precision screwdrivers and start trying to figure out where the hell it is. They're just going to get rid of it.

... Which I've thought about, but that's a level I don't think is really necessary for my own situation.