I think we're disagreeing that if a organization makes bad behavior notably easier (a cheap Airtag with a long battery life that's implementable by the vast majority of people, versus an old cellphone), they bear proportionate responsibility for the bad behavior.
It's not acceptable to me to significantly enable evil and just say that someone else (LEO) can handle it. In this case, that means figuring out stronger controls before releasing a product.
I'm not disagreeing that apple has some responsibility here. I'm saying they've pretty much done all they can without the cooperation of external forces.
Some things they could do are:
1. Make sure android phones also detect Airtags out of the box by coming up with some universal standard. This is not entirely in their hands.
2. Collaborate with LE to try to detect and warn of stalking behavior.
They could feasibly try to do #2 and brick devices that are likely to be involved in stalking, but I'm not sure if this is technically feasible (too high of a false positive rate would obviously cause issues, and it's not a lot of data to go off of).
It's not acceptable to me to significantly enable evil and just say that someone else (LEO) can handle it. In this case, that means figuring out stronger controls before releasing a product.