As is the tradition with every new Apple product, iFixit has published a teardown of the new AirTag, released last week. Here’s what they found.
The teardown also shows Apple’s U2 Ultra Wideband chip
First, the bad news. While it was widely rumored that the AirTag 2 would have an internal design that would be harder to handle, that hasn’t exactly happened.
Apple made the device’s speaker louder and also introduced “the first suite of protections against unwanted tracking, including cross-platform notifications and unique Bluetooth identifiers that change frequently.”
However, according to iFixIt’s findings, it’s still easy to completely disable the speaker without affecting AirTag functionality.
From the video:
“(…) you can see two fine wires leading from the speaker coil to the circuit board. The easiest way to non-destructively disable this speaker would be to remove the two wires with a soldering iron. I don’t expect that to work. I can imagine that Apple’s crack team of engineers has already thought of this and incorporated some means of detecting the drop in impedance produced by this circuit using the built-in vibration sensor that is built into the small speaker via the… No, no, it works (…) The speaker could be louder, but it’s still easy to disable.”
While not everyone may have a soldering iron handy, the fact that it’s still relatively easy to disable the speaker isn’t ideal, to say the least.
That said, iFixit’s teardown continues, revealing the underside of the printed circuit board (PCB), including an upgraded SoC that handles Bluetooth and NFC functions, as well as Apple’s U2 Ultra Wideband chip.
The latter allows the device to be more accurate, provided the user is tracking it with an iPhone 15 or later.
You can check out iFixit’s full teardown below:
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