Having become in just a few years an essential accessory for heads in the air, Apple AirTags could well improve considerably next year thanks to the integration of a new generation UWB chip.
Supposed to help you find your keys lost between the sofa cushions or your wallet that slipped behind the fridge, Apple AirTags have a limitation that can prove frustrating: their range. To ring the small beacon, you must actually be within a radius of 30 meters maximum. But this could quickly change with the arrival of the second generation of the accessory.
As Mark Gurman reveals in an article for Bloomberg. The AirTag 2, expected for 2025, could well triple the range of the “Precise Location” functionality. The latter is used to find your small beacon with a degree of precision close to a centimeter. It’s this tool that displays an arrow on the iPhone screen to tell you exactly where the lost item is.
From 30 m to almost 100 m
Currently, the range of AirTags is a maximum of 30 meters whereas more traditional Bluetooth tags can reach 100 meters in certain cases. AirTags could therefore get closer to the competition while keeping their main characteristic: relying on UWB more than on Bluetooth.
More precise than Bluetooth, Ultra Wide-Band still has the disadvantage of offering a shorter range. But by switching to a new generation UWB chip, the same one that currently equips the iPhone 15, Apple could well combine precision and distance in an AirTag 2 revisited from the inside.
This is not the first time rumors of this type have surfaced. Already last May, rumors of a possible more precise Airtag 2 were already emerging. Since then, much other more or less reliable information has leaked about future beacons, including a change in the construction of the device which would make tracking more difficult.
To go further
For its AirTag 2, Apple would focus above all on the Vision Pro
Since their arrival on the market, the first Airtags of the name have in fact been used on numerous occasions as spying tools on the part of jealous husbands or companions or sometimes by overly worried parents. The problem turned out to be serious enough for Apple to speak out on the subject and for Google to implement an unknown tag detection tool within Android.
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