Apple’s Next-Gen AirTags Could Arrive Next Year
Credit: Concept Creator / YouTube
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It’s been a little over three years since Apple released AirTags, and while it’s hard to imagine what the company might do for an encore, rumor has it that “AirTags 2” may be just around the corner.
While it’s not the first time we’ve heard this — analyst Ming-Chi Kuo shared a prediction in August 2023 that “AirTags 2” should be in mass production by now. However, Kuo gets his information from Apple’s supply chain and, like many such analysts, often has difficulty nailing down precise timelines.
In all fairness, Kuo revised that prediction late last year to suggest that the next generation of AirTags would arrive in 2025. Although we haven’t heard many updates over the past few months, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman recently added his support for this idea, plus a few interesting new details about what Apple will improve in its tracking tags.
In the latest issue of his Power On Newsletter, Gurman reveals that the new AirTag, code-named B589, is on track for release “around the middle of next year.” However, the “AirTag 2” isn’t expected to be the sort of upgrade that will make you want to run out and throw away your existing AirTags. Instead, Apple is focused on making the overall experience better to attract more new customers.
Gurman’s sources say the design will look similar to the current model — possibly even identical. That shouldn’t be a problem as Apple will likely discontinue the current AirTags when the new ones arrive. Regardless of the outside appearance, Apple plans to bolster the technology inside to offer increased range and some new privacy improvements.
Despite Apple’s best efforts, AirTags have gotten a bad rap for how easily they can be misused and abused by criminals, from stalkers to car thieves. Apple’s tags weren’t the first such tracking devices on the market — and studies have shown there are far more dangerous trackers out there — but the popularity and affordability of AirTags made them a popular choice for stalkers, and Apple’s fame has brought far more media scrutiny. In short, we’re far more likely to hear about it when someone is stalked using an AirTag than if this happens using a Tile tag or a GPS tracker.
Apple was the first company to build anti-stalking measures into its tracking tags, and they’ve helped a lot of people avoid tracking, butthey still haven’t always worked as well as they should. That’s because an AirTag has no way of knowing whether it’s being carried by a thief or a victim.
The good news is that Apple is still working to address these issues. Numerous fixes have been added to the software and firmware since the original AirTags were released, and now the new ones will include some additional hardware protections.
According to Gurman, one of these changes will be making it more difficult to remove the speaker from the AirTags. While an iPhone, iPad, or even an up-to-date Android phone can now let you know if an unknown AirTag is following you around, that doesn’t help folks who don’t have a compatible smartphone or don’t notice the alerts. Hence, Apple also incorporated a speaker to sound an audible alert when an AirTag starts moving after it’s been separated from its paired iPhone for more than a few hours (That time delay was originally three days, but Apple later lowered it to a random interval that kicks in after about eight hours).
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for silent AirTags to start showing up online, making it easy for AirTags to be used for nefarious purposes even by those without the technical know-how to disassemble the tags and disable the speaker themselves.
So, it’s no surprise that Apple wants to make its next AirTags more tamper-proof. While it’s unclear how it plans to go about this, it wouldn’t be too hard to engineer the hardware in such a way that attempting to disable the speaker or other critical components — or even opening the casing at all — renders the entire AirTag useless.
Gurman adds that the new AirTags will feature an improved onboard wireless chip. While he doesn’t go into detail, it seems likely this could be the so-called “U2” ultra-wideband chip added to the iPhone 15 lineup last year, which provides even more precise location tracking over greater distances, bringing precision friend finding to Apple’s latest iPhone models.
One thing that Gurman hasn’t commented on is Kuo’s 2023 prediction that the “AirTags 2” will integrate with the Vision Pro. If anything, an augmented reality precision finding mode for the Vision Pro seems likely — it’s something Apple was working on even in the early days that some believed was scrapped due to the higher latency of the current AirTags.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
