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#Apple #AirTag #speaker

So first of all what is an Apple Air tag? Because there might be some people that haven’t heard of this. It’s this small coin sized device, powered by a CR2032 battery, it features a Ultra Wide Band & Bluetooth radio connectivity in there, due to the apple U1 chip, which is capable of both low power data transmission but also measuring of the time it takes for these radio waves to bounce back which can be translated into measurement of distance with a precision of 1cm within a limited range.

Now because Apple built its own Ultra Wide Band chip, the so called U1 chip and because it operates a fleet of roughly 1.8 billions of iphones globally you can imagine how it makes sense for them technically and financially to sell such a tracker because it doesn’t need to transmit too far before it’s been picked up by one of those 1.8 billion iphones that are active globally. So every time this little tracker is within range of an iphone, the phone will pickup its signal and will report back to the mothership with the air tag serial number as well as the GPS position of the phone at that time. And this happens transparently, you don’t even know it and while you can turn this feature off if you wanted, the setting is buried deep and it affects things like how you connect to other apple products so you wouldn’t really want to have it disabled.

Another feature of the Air Tag is that it contains a small speaker which is capable of playing sounds, it can be triggered from the Find My app and you can see how this can be useful for locating your stuff, like when you lose your keys and they are under a pillow or something.

So people started using these things to track their keys, their personal belongings like a bicycle, a car, a suitcase during travel, whatever you own and legally have the right to track. But bad people also started using these to track other people which is illegal so following up on those cases, Apple decided to introduce a new feature and now AirTags will play a sound without any way of stopping that, wherever they’ve been connected to the same iphone for several days in a row. As you can imagine this is the case when someone is trying to illegally track you by placing one of these in your car or purse, because the airtag will only be connecting to your iphone which is always with you.

So here is what you’ll need, just a utility knife and with some careful prying, you should be able to disable the speaker with minimal damage to the air tag. It’s best if you use a beefy utility knife, with a strong blade which would prevent it from snapping in the process. I’ve seen a bunch of other videos showing you how to take it apart but they almost always use excessive force, which breaks the little clips holding the case together. What I’m gonna show you allows you to open this without destroying it.

So first step is to remove the battery and then hold the airtag in this position. There are 3 clips holding it together and the enclosure is a very tight fit. But you should expect the clips to be roughly at these positions which I’ve marked on the case. So by prying with the knife blade at exactly those positions you are able to unclip the retaining clips one by one without destroying them.

Once you have it opened, we get a clear view of the speaker which is composed of two parts. The coil and the magnet. The simplest way to disable the sound is to remove the magnet, you can pry it open with the knife as it’s only held in place by some light adhesive. And at this point you can put the airtag back together. And if at any point in the future you want to restore the sound you can just place the magnet back in the same position.

One mention here is that a speaker coil even without a magnet, still makes a very small amount of noise, it’s something that if you have good hearing you can only hear in a quiet room by placing the air tag next to your ear. Certainly not something you would hear from 12m away in a normal environment. But if you consider that sound to be audible and you want it completely removed, you would have to gently disconnect one of the coil contacts which would completely disable it. I don’t find that to be necessary but I thought I’d mention it.