Listen to the AirTag’s remixed new chime

The AirTag was announced earlier this week, and as I wrote at the time, it seemed like an opportunity had been missed to properly rethink the product. As announced, the speaker is louder, the effective tracking range has increased, but very little else seems to have changed.

But skeptics are sure to change their tune, literally, when they test out the AirTag’s updated sonic capabilities. An early purchaser has posted a comparison of the new and old chime to Twitter/X and, unheralded by Apple, the alert sound has moved up the musical scale from an F to a G. (Being away from my piano, I verified this using Virtual Piano.) The rhythm and tempo of the chime remain the same: a little flourish, followed by three sets of seven notes. You can clearly hear the higher pitch in the recording, but the increased power of the speaker is not really discernible, although those with better ears may disagree.

It’s not clear why those 21 notes have changed from an F to a G. There could be a scientific reason, since higher notes tend to be easier to discern (or harder to ignore) for various anatomical and evolutionary reasons. But going up by a single note surely wouldn’t make much of a difference in that regard, and it could just be a product manager’s whim, or the usual urge to create a detectable difference between otherwise identical generations of a product. It could just be a way of showing off that you’ve got the latest AirTag, in other words.

The new AirTag is available now.