Who can believe that AirTags, Apple’s little button-shaped Bluetooth trackers, have been with us for five whole years? Or that they haven’t been with us forever. There were small, personal trackers before that, like Tile and Samsung SmartTag, but Apple’s AirTags took over to the extent of becoming shorthand for such a device, in the way that Uber has come to mean any rideshare.

Apple launched the second-generation AirTags at the beginning of 2026. If you’re paying the full $90 retail price for a four-pack, the choice between the first- and second-generation is obvious. Go with the newer ones. But Best Buy is offering a deal for first-gen AirTags for $59.99, and that tips the scales back in favor of the older (but still very capable) first-gen AirTags.

a better value

The new AirTags are louder. Fifty percent louder, according to Apple, and offer 50 percent greater range, too. More range is never a bad thing, and the original AirTags are pretty quiet when bleating out their alarm. I’ve tried to activate one in a not-too-noisy bar and couldn’t hear it well enough to find out who’d swiped my bag. Other than that, the newer generation of AirTag looks identical and behaves identically.

That’s why there’s been no point lately to buying the leftover first-gen AirTags that retailers are clearing out—they’ve been the same price. Best Buy changed the equation when it cut 40 percent off the price of the first-gen four-pack. They’re not 40 percent less of a Bluetooth tracker. They’re very good, and I haven’t felt very compelled to replace my three first-gen AirTags since the newer version came out.

The little AirTags aren’t cheap, but they pay for themselves in peace of mind several fold, from keeping vigilance over a laptop bag brought to a café and tracking luggage as it moves from airport to airplane to airport. I’d have lost my mind if I hadn’t had an AirTag (first-generation) in the bag that KLM Airlines lost this past February. Five days I spent idle in East Africa not hearing anything more from the airline than my bag was somewhere in Europe.

Last-gen or not, I drew enough comfort from my constant checks of the AirTag’s status that the $30 I paid for the single AirTag didn’t even register on my mind. And right now, you can get four of ’em for $50.