Half the Apple AirTag 4 Pack Deals Are the Old Tag

Search for an Apple AirTag 4 pack in the UK this week and you get four different prices back: £99, £75, £69 and £59.50. That looks like a spread of deals on one product. It is not.

Roughly half of those listings are the first-generation AirTag, which Apple stopped selling in January, and almost none of them say so on the search result itself. The gap matters more than a normal price difference too, because the thing the second-generation tag improves does not work on every iPhone.

So the cheap pack is either a genuine bargain or a small mistake, depending entirely on which phone is in your pocket. Here is the arithmetic, and the one line in Apple's spec sheet that settles it.

What an Apple AirTag 4 pack costs at Apple

Apple launched the second-generation AirTag on 26 January 2026, and its UK newsroom post put it at £29 for a single and £99 for a four-pack. Those are still the prices on Apple's UK store today, and John Lewis matches the £99 exactly.

Apple no longer lists the original AirTag anywhere. Its UK AirTag pages sell one product in two pack sizes, and that product is the second generation. Anything cheaper you find is a retailer working through old stock, or a marketplace seller doing the same.

That is normal and perfectly legitimate. The problem is what it does to a search results page.

The cheaper four-packs are a different tracker

Argos still runs a listing titled Apple AirTag (1st Generation) - 4 Pack at £69. PriceSpy's first-generation four-pack page has eBay at £72.92, ao.com and Boots Kitchen Appliances at £75, and Wowcher at £79.99. All of those are clearly labelled if you click through and read carefully.

PriceRunner is the awkward one. Its Apple AirTag 4-Pack page does not name a generation at all, and it shows £59.50 at O2 Mobiles as the cheapest of 26 stores. Land there from Google and nothing on the page tells you which tracker you are about to buy.

Amazon's top result for the plain phrase is the second generation, but its result for a broader AirTag search is a first-generation four-pack. The two generations sit next to each other in the same results, sorted by price, with the older one winning on the number that most people click.

The four-pack saving, in actual money

This next bit is my own arithmetic on Apple's current UK prices, not a figure Apple publishes.

Four singles at £29 each is £116. The four-pack is £99. So the pack saves you £17, which is £4.25 per tag, or 14.7 per cent off the singles price. That works out at £24.75 per tag.

It is a real saving but a modest one, and worth naming plainly, because buy-the-multipack advice usually implies a bigger reward than that. £24.75 is what a second-generation AirTag actually costs you when you buy four at once.

Now put the older packs next to it. At Argos's £69 you are paying £17.25 per tag. At the £59.50 O2 price you are paying £14.88. Against Apple's £24.75 that is £7.50 or £9.87 less per tag, which makes the current pack between 43 and 66 per cent more expensive depending on which clearance price you can actually find in stock.

On four tags, that is the difference between spending £59.50 and spending £99. It is not a rounding error.

The upgrade only lands on some iPhones

Here is the part that decides it, and it is the reason I would not simply tell everyone to buy the newest one.

The second-generation AirTag's headline improvement is Precision Finding that guides you from up to 50 per cent farther away, driven by Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband chip. But Apple's own tech specs page attaches a condition to it. The improved Precision Finding needs the tag paired with an iPhone Air or an iPhone 15 or later, and Apple names one exception in the same sentence: "excluding iPhone 16e".

So if you are on an iPhone 14, 13, 12 or 11, or you bought a 16e, the single biggest reason to pay £99 instead of £69 does not apply to you. You still get standard Precision Finding, which is what the old tag already gave you. You would be paying the premium for a feature your phone cannot run.

That is an unusual situation for an Apple accessory, and it is not something any of the retail listings mention.

What the new tag gives you on any iPhone

Two of the improvements are in the tag itself, so they land regardless of your phone. The speaker is 50 per cent louder than the previous generation, which Apple says means you can hear it from twice as far away. The Bluetooth chip has been upgraded as well, widening the range at which the tag can be picked up at all.

There is a genuinely new one if you wear an Apple Watch. Precision Finding now works on Apple Watch Series 9 or later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, which is the first time the watch has been able to do it at all.

The new tag also works with Share Item Location, which lets you hand a lost bag's location to a third party such as an airline, with the share expiring automatically after seven days. If you put tags in checked luggage, that one feature may justify the whole gap on its own.

What you give up on the older tag

Less than you might think. The first-generation AirTag still works with Find My, still does Precision Finding on any UWB iPhone, still rings, still uses a user-replaceable CR2032 coin cell, and is still rated IP67 for water resistance. Apple has not switched anything off.

What you lose is the extended range, the louder speaker, the newer Bluetooth chip, watch-based Precision Finding and the airline sharing. On an older iPhone, three of those five were never going to reach you anyway.

Which Apple AirTag 4 pack you should actually buy

Buy the £99 second-generation four-pack if you are on an iPhone 15, 16, 17 or an iPhone Air, and especially if you travel with checked bags. The improved range works on your phone, the airline sharing is useful, and you get the current product with a proper warranty from Apple or John Lewis.

Buy a first-generation four-pack at £69 or less if your iPhone is a 14 or older, or a 16e. The upgrade you would be paying for is one you cannot use, the old tag does exactly the same job of finding your keys in the sofa, and £30 to £40 saved across four tags buys a lot of keyrings to put them on.

Skip the pack altogether if you genuinely only need to tag one bag. Four tags means four coin cells to keep on top of, and the saving is £4.25 each. A single second-generation tag at £29 is the tidier answer, and you can always add another later.

One thing only Apple offers, whichever pack you choose: engraving. Its store will personalise AirTags with text and emoji and no retailer will. Buying four for a household, that is a practical way of telling whose is whose rather than pure decoration.

If the appeal of the cheaper pack is simply paying less for Apple hardware in general, Apple's refurbished store is the other route worth knowing about, though what you get for the discount is very different between iPhones and Macs.

Apple AirTag 4 pack: frequently asked questions

Is the Apple AirTag 4 pack cheaper than buying four singles?

Yes, but not dramatically. Apple UK sells singles at £29 and the four-pack at £99, so four singles would be £116 and the pack saves £17. That is £4.25 per tag, or 14.7 per cent. My arithmetic, on Apple's prices today.

How do I tell whether an AirTag listing is the old generation?

Check the product title for the words 2nd generation, then check the price against Apple's. Apple UK sells only the second generation, at £29 and £99. A four-pack priced below about £90 is almost certainly first-generation stock, even where the listing does not say so.

Does the first-generation AirTag still work?

Yes. It works with Find My, rings, does Precision Finding on a compatible iPhone and takes the same replaceable battery. What it does not have is the extended finding range, the louder speaker, the upgraded Bluetooth chip or Apple Watch Precision Finding.

My take

The interesting thing here is not that the new AirTag is poor value. At £24.75 a tag it is priced about where you would expect. It is that Google's results have quietly collapsed a discontinued product and its replacement into one price comparison, and the cheaper number is the one that wins the click.

So work out which iPhone you have before you work out which pack you want. On an iPhone 15 or later, the £99 pack is the right buy and I would not hesitate. On anything older, including the 16e, you are being asked for roughly 43 per cent more to get a feature your phone will not run, and the clearance pack is the smarter money while it lasts.

And if you are buying more than trackers this month, two things change the maths elsewhere: AppleCare One works differently once you have several devices on one plan, and the Apple student discount is flat cash rather than a percentage, which changes which products it is actually worth using on.

Source: Apple introduces new AirTag with expanded range and improved findability, Apple Newsroom