As is tradition with any new Apple product, iFixit has published a teardown of the new AirTag, released last week. Here’s what they found.
Teardown also shows Apple’s U2 Ultra Wideband chip
First up, the bad news. While it was widely rumored that the AirTag 2 would feature an internal design that would be harder to tamper with, that didn’t exactly come to pass.
What Apple did was make the device’s speaker louder, as well as introduce “a suite of industry-first protections against unwanted tracking, including cross-platform alerts and unique Bluetooth identifiers that change frequently.”
However, according to iFixIt’s findings, it is still easy to completely disable the speaker without affecting the AirTag’s functionality.
From the video:
“[…] you can see two fine wires leading from the speaker coil to the PCB. The easiest way to non-destructively disable that speaker would be to remove the two wires with a soldering iron. I’m not expecting this to work. I’d imagine Apple’s team of crack engineers have already thought of this and incorporated some means of detecting the drop in impedance across the circuitry, or maybe they’re using the built-in accelerometer to detect the signature vibrations produced by this tiny speaker across the… No, no, it works. […] The speaker may be louder, but it’s still easy to disable.”
While not everyone might have a soldering iron at hand, the fact that it is still possible to relatively easily disable the speaker is less than ideal, to say the least.
That said, iFixit’s teardown goes on to show the underside of the printed circuit board (PCB), including the upgraded SoC that handles Bluetooth and NFC functionality, as well as Apple’s U2 Ultra Wideband chip.
The latter is what enables the device’s greater Precision Finding, provided that the user is tracking it with an iPhone 15 or later.
You can check out iFixit’s full teardown below:
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