AirTag 2 teardown finds speaker easily disabled

A report from Zdnet says the author disabled the speaker on Apple's new AirTag 2 in less than two minutes using basic tools.

The reporter says they opened the tag with a single spudger rather than specialist tools and that it popped back together with no problem after the operation.

After reassembly the modified AirTag worked and "burst silently to life"; Zdnet notes there is a market for modified tracker tags, with the most common modification being a disabled speaker, which can make it easier to surreptitiously track people.

Zdnet also says Apple could issue a firmware update to detect a cut speaker by monitoring the current across it and render modified tags useless, and the reporter kept a modified tag to see whether it later stops working or shows an error.