I took apart the new AirTag 2 and found a serious flaw in Apple’s popular tracker

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ZDNET Highlights

• Stalkers can disable the AirTag speakers making them harder to find.
• I disabled the speaker in two minutes with the help of basic tools.
• Apple may still release an update to detect the tampering.

I love apple airtags. I have quite a few of them in use, and they save me a lot of hassle when I’ve left my keys in a stupid place, as well as no end of worry when travelling.

Without a doubt, they are the best finder tags on the market.

Also: Best Bluetooth Trackers of 2026: Our Top Picks for Keeping Track of Your Stuff

But I also understand that they can be used for nefarious purposes. While Apple (and Google) have come a long way to help stop people from using tags to stalk them, modified hardware still presents a problem. My investigation shows that there is quite a market for tracker tags – particularly AirTags – that have been modified. The most common modification is to disable the speaker.

I’m not saying it’s always wrong to modify AirTags, and I can see reasons why people might want AirTags in a different size or with the speaker disabled.

Also: Revised AirTags raise major privacy concerns, especially for Android users

But a cool AirTag makes it easier to track people secretly.

I had hoped that Apple would have taken advantage of the difficult opportunity to modify the new AirTags. Even a little epoxy resin will go a long way.

The thing is cheap, so I bought a pack of it new airtags And separated one and went to work. I gave the AirTag a good chance because I decided not to open the AirTag the way I would if I was doing it the right way (with the proper tools, solvents, and a heat gun) and did so with a tool – a spitter.

I’m not going to give you step-by-step instructions, but I was able to easily open and disable the AirTag’s speaker in minutes.

But will AirTags come back together again?

Also: My old car survived a 500-mile cross-country road trip — I have this gadget to thank for it

To make a short story even shorter, it will come back together without any problems.

One last thing: will tags work? I fitted the battery, and the tag silently popped off.

And the whole process took two minutes, and I only used the spudger.

So Apple certainly hasn’t made it hard to tamper with AirTags. If anything, these newcomers find it easy to get in.

But… Apple may be able to provide a firmware update that can detect the fact that the speaker has been disconnected by adding code that monitors the current in the speaker and looks for a situation where the speaker is activating but no current is flowing through it. This can be used to render modified tags useless.

With this in mind, I have kept my modified tag to see if someday it stops working or produces some kind of error.