We all know phones even without a sim inside can be tracked by cell towers. Your phone pings the IMEI to the cell tower so you can make emergency calls without a sim.
There are (typically business) laptops with a sim slot like some thinkpads. If I don’t put a sim inside, can that sill be tracked by a cell tower in the same way?
As far as I know, even cell towers can only triangulate your position and is less accurate than GPS. But I don’t think this happens when there is no SIM card installed for your device to ping the tower or vice versa.
I diagree triangulating your location with towers is more accurate than wifi access points due to having more than 2 access points in the case of towers.
That’s incorrect.
Your phone can connect to a tower even without sim if not in offline flight mode.
That’s why you can call emergency services even without a sim.
So yes, you can be located even without a sim.
Not sure about a laptop though.
I dont have one on hand so cant tell for sure, but just like other PC hardware, I would assume it depends on the driver and PC firmware.
I would usually disable the modules I dont use.
I said what I said thinking for a laptop and not a smartphone.
But I also said as far as I understand so I could be wrong.
I see. Do you have more info on this you can share? I’d like yo learn more about it.
I have a thinkpad with an empty SIM slot, I’m also curious.
Here is an example thinkpad which can have such an option, meaning it would a WWAN card (page 5). And if I understand correctly, WWAN cards therefore give laptops an IMEI.
It’s going to be data only, so can’t make calls or texts. So there wouldn’t be the same emergency services justification to ping IMEI as with phones?
Yes. The ability of a device to connect to a cellular network has nothing to do with whether it has a SIM card. A SIM card is used for authenticating yourself as a paying customer thereby allowing you to use the internet, and place non-emergency calls. Without a SIM card your device can still connect to the cellular network and can share it’s IMEI as well as other unique identifiers (for example when placing emergency calls).
You should place your device in Airplane mode or disable the cellular modem in the BIOS if you don’t want it to make any connections.
Right. But since laptops can’t make any calls (let alone emergency), does the same logic apply?
Didn’t think of that. Guess that’s an option 
I would like to plug my own threads: