Upvoting you, as you are totally right. The AOP is a standby feature, not while powered off. And why would it, the BluetoothLE chips available for years already

Upvoting you, as you are totally right. The AOP is a standby feature, not while powered off. And why would it, the BluetoothLE chips available for years already have this wake-up functionality drawing very little power. I own a Bose BT Speaker and a FiiO BTR5 - both can be "off" (using their power-off buttons) but will still suddenly turn on when I explicitly connect to them through my laptop or phone. They are in this BT LE listening state 24/7. All Apple did, is basically enable this mode now on the existing chips which are BT-LE capable for several iPhone generations. Once woken up using BT-LE, the AOP takes over to reply to FindMy-like beacons (and enable other iPhones to trigger the wake-up beacons when locating other phones).