What to Expect from the ‘AirTag 2’
Auguras Pipiras
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While we hear plenty of stories about Apple’s AirTags locating lost luggage, reuniting canine companions with their pet parents, and helping cops track down lost cars, we haven’t heard much from Apple about what it may do for an encore to the well-known tracking accessory.
Apple isn’t ignoring the AirTags; just last year, it unveiled a new feature in iOS 18.2 that will let you share your AirTags with airline staff to help track down your bags when they don’t arrive at your destination when you do. However, this was strictly a software update. The AirTags as we know them have remained essentially unchanged since they were first released in 2021.
To be fair, there isn’t necessarily a ton of room for improvement. As designed, the AirTags work very well, and it seems Apple agrees. The company reportedly has a sequel in the works, but from everything we’ve heard, they’re likely to be little more than a modest refresh designed to improve range and safety.
Based on everything we’ve heard over the past year, Apple is expected to release new AirTags in the next few weeks, featuring the updated Ultra Wideband chip introduced with the iPhone 15. This will provide a greater range and also more accuracy for precision finding. It also plans to enhance the safety features in several ways to make it more difficult for AirTags to be used for illegal and other nefarious purposes.
While some pundits have predicted AirTags with rechargeable batteries or advanced features like Vision Pro integration, Apple doesn’t have anything nearly as ambitious in mind. The current AirTag uses a standard CR2032 lithium coin battery that can be purchased almost anywhere and only needs to be changed about once a year. Plus, the use of replaceable batteries leaves the door open to other solutions for folks who want significantly longer battery life.
A rechargeable battery would increase the size of the AirTag, as it would need to accommodate a USB-C port for wired charging or coils and circuitry for wireless charging, and would undoubtedly make them more expensive. AirTags are also often stashed in places where it’s more convenient to change a coin cell than connect them to a charging cable.
More significantly, a removable battery is also the AirTag’s best safety feature. The most straightforward way to stop an AirTag from tracking you is to remove the battery. That’s something that even the most non-technical person can understand; it wasn’t surprising that, despite early speculation that Apple would have some software-based way of electronically disabling a found AirTag, the instructions for dealing with a suspicious AirTag in the Find My app were nothing more than a guide on how to remove the battery. The simplest solutions are often the most effective.
This makes it very unlikely that Apple will change the removable battery. If anything, it’s been looking for ways to make the AirTags even safer against abuse by stalkers and other criminals.
Even though AirTags are far from the most dangerous trackers out there, we seem to hear a disproportionate number of stories about how they’ve led to dangerous situations. A big part of that is Apple’s popularity, which leads both to the AirTags becoming the tool of choice for rookie criminals and the news media paying more attention when an “Apple” device is caught behaving badly.
Ironically, Apple was the first company to create tracking devices with integrated anti-stalking measures. When domestic safety advocates raised concerns that those didn’t go far enough, Apple made several adjustments in firmware updates to improve things. We hear enough stories of unknown AirTags being discovered by people to know that Apple’s safety features work well, but they’re still not foolproof. After all, nobody has yet figured out the AI necessary to let an AirTag decide whether it’s being carried away by a thief ripping off your stuff or if it’s been attached to a stalking victim.
Apple has likely done everything it can to address this in software, which may be one of the reasons a new version of the AirTag is on the horizon. According to a report last fall, Apple plans to make a few small but significant improvements to the new AirTags that will make them even safer.
One of the big changes will be making the AirPods more difficult to tamper with. From the start, Apple incorporated an audible alarm that would go off when an AirTag started moving around while separated from its paired iPhone. These weren’t triggered immediately — the initial delay was three days, but Apple later lowered it to a few hours — but they were definitely a problem for those who wanted to plant AirTags on potential victims.
Sadly, it was relatively easy to remove the speaker, and some folks even began selling silent AirTags on eBay. While that won’t prevent someone’s iPhone or even a modern Android device from reporting an unknown AirTag that’s been planted on them, it still increases the risk that it might not be discovered until it’s too late for a potential victim, such as only discovering the AirTag after they’ve arrived home and thereby given away their address. Plus, not everyone has a smartphone, making the audible alert the only safety feature for more vulnerable groups of people.
While Apple can’t do much about the thousands of AirTags that are already out there, the next generation of the tracker will reportedly make the speaker much harder to remove. It’s unclear how this will work, but the most likely implementation would be to engineer the AirTag in such a way that tampering with the speaker will render the entire device useless. Apple might even go so far as to disable any AirTag that’s had its casing removed, which would also close the door to other types of tampering and hacking.
The open question is whether we’ll see the new AirTags announced during next week’s Apple event. While it would be as good a time as any to show them off, it’s also possible that Apple might choose to quietly sneak them out via press release rather than add one more thing to an event that’s already expected to be packed with new iPhones, Apple Watches, and likely even the AirPods Pro 3.
Whether Apple devotes any stage time to AirTags will largely depend on how much it wants to say about them, but if it’s truly making significant improvements to the safety features, that’s likely something it will want to tout as a major update, especially after the negative publicity it’s received every time AirTags have been used by crooks over the past four years.
[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.]
