Let’s be honest: the defining feeling of modern travel is the lingering paranoia that your bag is currently enjoying a holiday in Dubai while you’re standing at a carousel in Sydney awaiting its arrival. When Apple dropped the original AirTag five years ago, they sold us a sedative for that anxiety for fifty bucks. It wasn’t perfect, but it became indispensable baggage and keyring hardware almost overnight.
Today, the AirTag 2 (Apple call it the ‘new AirTag’) arrived. While it looks identical to the original, retaining that familiar white puck and polished stainless-steel button aesthetic, the internals have seen a serious overhaul that makes the upgrade essential.
The headline here is the range. The original was great if you were in the same room or a quiet house. But add a few thick walls, a multi-story layout, or the chaos of a busy Qantas terminal, and it often became a frustrating guessing game. The new model packs Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip (the same silicon in the iPhone 17 Pro) which bumps the Precision Finding range by a massive 50 percent.
Practically speaking, this means you can pinpoint your keys buried in a gym bag from the other end of the pub, or locate your golf travel case before it even hits the oversized baggage belt. You spend less time wandering around in circles looking like you’re dowsing for water with your phone.
They’ve also addressed the volume. The old speaker was polite to a fault. If your wallet slipped under a heavy couch cushion, you had almost no chance of hearing the faint chirp. The new AirTag is significantly louder, meaning you can actually hear the chime over ambient noise. Apple also hardened the acoustic chamber to make it tough for bad actors to disable the speaker, a necessary nod to safety concerns.
Crucially for those of us who invested in expensive leather key fobs or luggage tags, the dimensions remain unchanged, so old accessories fit perfectly. And at $49 (or $165 for a 4-pack), the price is staying put. In an era where inflation is the excuse for everything else costing twenty percent more, that’s a win. This is the utilitarian upgrade that makes life just a little bit less anxiety inducing.
