4 hours ago
3
It took me less than two minutes to disable the speaker on Apple's new AirTag.
Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.
ZDNET's key takeaways
- Stalkers can disable AirTag speakers to make them harder to find.
- I disabled the speaker in two minutes with basic tools.
- Apple could still push an update to detect tampering.
I love Apple AirTags. I have a lot of them in use, and they save me no end of hassles when I've put my keys down somewhere stupid, as well as no end of worry when traveling.
They are, without doubt, the best finder tags on the market.
Also: The best Bluetooth trackers of 2026: Our top picks to keep tabs on your stuff
But I also understand that they can be used for nefarious purposes. While Apple (and Google) have gone a long way to help prevent the tags from being used to stalk people, modified hardware still presents a problem. My investigations suggest that there's quite a market for tracker tags -- especially AirTags -- that have been modified. The most common modification is to disable the speaker.
I'm not saying that modifying an AirTag is always wrong, and I can see reasons why people might want an AirTag in a different shape or with the speaker disabled.
Also: Modified AirTags pose major privacy concerns, especially for Android users
But a silenced AirTag does make it easier to surreptitiously track people.
I'd hoped that Apple would have taken the opportunity to make the newer AirTags harder to modify. Even a little epoxy resin would go a long way.
Brand new AirTag... ready for an operation!
Talk is cheap, so I bought a pack of the new AirTags and went to work, taking one apart. I gave the AirTag a good chance because I decided that I wasn't going to go about opening the AirTag like I would if I was doing it right (with proper tools, solvents, and a heat gun) and went at it with one tool -- a spudger.
A spudger made short work of getting into the guts of the AirTag.
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.
The speaker was easy to disable. The whole process, from unboxing to putting the AirTag back together took two minutes.
But would the AirTag go back together again?
Also: My old car just survived a 500-mile cross-country road trip - I have this gadget to thank for that
Cut a short story even shorter, it popped back together no problem.
One last thing: would the tag work? I fitted the battery, and the tag burst silently to life.
The modfied AirTag worked fine.
And the whole process took two minutes, and all I used was the spudger.
So Apple definitely hasn't made AirTags harder to tamper with. If anything, these new ones feel easier to get into.
But... Apple might be able to deliver a firmware update that could detect the fact that the speaker has been cut by adding code that monitors the current across the speaker and looks for a situation where the speaker is being activated but no current flows across it. This could be used to render modified tags useless.
With this in mind, I've kept my modified tag to see if one day it stops working or throws up some type of error.
English (US) ·