AirTag 2 has a lot more to prove than most Apple products

18 hours ago 1

Apple is reportedly planning to ship AirTag 2 next year, about four years after its predecessor. And when it arrives, it will have a lot more to prove than most other Apple products. Here’s why.

Upgraded AirTag 2 will include three key changes

AirTag isn’t the kind of product that you would expect annual updates for. It’s a fairly simple utility device. But now that several years have passed since the original’s introduction, Apple apparently has some worthy upgrades ready.

Mark Gurman writes:

the new version will look similar to the current model, but offer better range, bolster the onboard wireless chip and improve privacy

I want to focus on this last point—privacy—because it’s one of the main reasons I think Apple has a lot to prove with AirTag 2.

Privacy will be at forefront of AirTag 2 expectations

Ever since the first AirTag shipped, there have been countless stories of it being misused and abused in awful ways. Stalkers have made the device a go-to tool for tracking others without consent.

Apple has made changes to prevent this behavior, but there’s more that can be done—and a hardware refresh means expectations for improvement will be deservedly high.

Gurman says that with AirTag 2, Apple will be “making it more difficult for someone to remove the speaker from the AirTag.” This would ensure any ill-intended AirTags can still make a noise and thus be identified more easily.

I’m hopeful that Apple will also beef up the internal speaker’s capabilities, making it harder to miss any sort of detection signal.

Apple’s goal with AirTag 2 should be to make it as stalker-unfriendly as possible.

The company touts its value of user privacy often. Yet with AirTag, it has inadvertently found itself providing a tool for some of the most grievous privacy violations.

Simply improving the tech specs with better range and a more capable wireless chip won’t be enough. Apple needs to show that it’s learned from the last four years of AirTag abuse by making AirTag 2 as safe and privacy-sensitive as possible.

Likely that will involve some hardware changes, but I’m also looking for software updates that make AirTag stalking a thing of the past.

What changes do you hope to see with AirTag 2? Let us know in the comments.