I still run my house on three of the last airport base stations placed around the house like a mesh network, and airport express scattered around the house for iTunes.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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I was informed by my fiber provider that my Airport Extremes were super insecure a couple years ago.
Your fiber provider is full of shit.
It hasn’t been updated in years, I’m sure it’s full of vulnerabilities
2019 was the last update… a full year after they discontinued it. They agreed to support it for five years, which would end this year.
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What’s with the downvotes, this is the way. Rock solid for 6 years with no resets ever.
Aren't the express models pretty slow if you're using a faster modern internet connection? They only have 100mbps ethernet. Or is the idea that you use them only in mesh and they rely purely on the wireless n?
Youre right about this. My Expresses are used only for airplay, so the WiFi mode is either off, or set to “join a wifi network,” depending on their proximity to an ethernet switch. They are basically acting like any other device on a wifi network, and not as a router.
I have three of the latest/last Airport Extreme towers, and two of those are the only ones with the wifi turned on to “Extend a network.” Since they are all on ac, theoretically there should be no slowdown to n speeds.
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I had to scroll way down here to find people that still use them.
This is me right now https://i.imgur.com/MOUgJwL.png
Express are mostly for Airplay, but still serve WiFi.
I still have my little AirPort Time Capsule tower. It’s been nearly a decade and that thing has been dutifully backing up my data every single day, save for a few hiccups over the years. I switched it from hourly to daily to maybe get some extra years out of it, but man. I absolutely love that product. The NAS marketplace even to this day hasn’t made a product as simple and seamless as the time capsule - plus it’s a great router!
You might want to do a test restore just to make sure the disk in there is still good. A decade is a long time for a mechanical disk, and you might just be writing your latest files to the disk dutifully every day while bad sectors linger elsewhere on the disk.
Just saying... verify your backups. And I mean by doing a restore, not Apple's verify which doesn't actually check every byte.
It's usually good to have at least two backups anyway.
I bought an m3 iMac a couple weeks ago and used my time capsule to migrate everything. Worked perfectly!
I worked at Apple for 21 years in Comms QA and I had good times working with the AirPort base station guys. The tower AirPort Extreme was a great unit and I still have one brand new that I bought when I heard Apple was ending production. It doesn’t support all of the current bells and whistles, but it was just a good, solid unit. Sadly, the base station team has been scattered to the winds, but I memba.
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I bought two of these with broken hard disks, installed new 3Tb disks and use them as NAS. Performance is great.
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If they just made a HomePod that also worked as a WiFi router I’d buy the shit out of it.
I partially agree with you. The problem is that the wifi router requires an Ethernet cable to connect to the modem which limits where you can put it.
What would be cool is to have a base station that’s just a router (maybe with HomePod functionality), but then add-on mesh network hotspots that work as HomePods. These would be a lot more flexible for placement.
Would have been a great idea
I have been pleading for them to have all the various wifi enabled devices serve as a mesh network! Essentially idden and integrated into existing devices that “need” to be there and connected anyway...
I really thought that was the endgame for removing the airport series...
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Man how I hate macaddress.
Because it’s a LTT channel?
I wish this wasn't a sponsored video because I think there's more natural options for AirPort replacements than the Asus products shown. eero for example "feels" much more like AirPort - simple, inoffensive designs that can fit in to a house's decor with simple app-based setup that you're not supposed to need to touch again afterwards at a much lower price than Asus' offerings.
ASUS has products similar to eero with a more sedate design. The zen series comes in a range of shapes and isn’t tied to amazon.
Yeah I have an eero 6 pro 3 pack with HomeKit secure router. As much as I like eero, just having to log in with my Amazon account irks me to no end. And it tries to sell you on echo and Alexa stuff at every screen during set up.
What bothers me is that even if you buy (own) echo devices, it still puts that crap in your face all the time. Same for the Ring app. Crappy nuisance atop otherwise decent software
Also the content to advertisement ratio is ridiculous.
Eero is awesome
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I had no idea that there were competing wireless standards and apple paved the way to make Wi-Fi the standard. But then again, I wasn't aware of high tech details in 1999. I just thought the iBook was super cool.
I had an iBook about 21 or so years ago. It was the white one that came after those original green plastic iMac looking ones, and it was the first device I ever used wifi. I bought my first wifi router because of it, the classic Linksys black and blue, the 802.11b one, g wasn't even out yet.
That was the first project I worked on when I started at Apple as a contractor in 2001.
This guys face is so punchable
Jonathan’s vids remind me of old snazzy labs — just some real good history and insight from an enthusiast that the major tech YouTubes gloss over
While I agree, this entire video was an advertisement for a 899 dollar (Canadian) Asus router with dubious marketing strategies. I really don’t enjoy that angle - but that’s me.
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I had a couple of the airports. They were a hell of a lot easier to to set up than anything else being made at the time. I wish they still made them. They were expensive as hell, but practically bulletproof.
They were awesome, but AMPLIFI Alien is an easy, reliable and performant spiritual successor in almost every aspect to the airports extremes in my experience.
I honestly don't get why anyone would want a new Apple Networking product at all when there are plenty of companies doing it all already. It's not like their network hardware was anything special really.
No offense, I do give them props for adopting new network tech early (at a cost of course), like they are with 10GBs ethernet.
But nothing they make now will sale let alone break much ground. Their network hardware didn't sale much either, with the exception of addon cards ultimately. Its not something Apple can lock down to their benefit ultimately.
Once upon a time, the ISPs would send you a modem and you had to buy a router separately. And then even for a while, they'd include a modem/wireless router combo, but it often sucked and a lot of people would buy a separate router anyway.
Nowadays? The ISPs are giving you free wireless routers that do everything the masses will ever need. My ISP, Verizon, even does little monthly self tests on the network and they'll apparently send us free mesh networking nodes if they detect there's an area where some of our devices aren't getting good signal.
Why would apple even compete in this arena? When most users are having their needs met by their ISP for free? The only people really buying routers nowadays are the power users who want to be on the cutting edge of technology. And that's an area where apple doesn't like to compete. So it makes sense that they don't.
I’ve been dreaming of a combo of an AirPort mesh WiFi, wired Smoke Detector, and Home Hub.
I’d have a WiFi hub on every floor. I’d be able to free up counter/cabinet space from my HomePods and Eeros that I don’t really need, and I’d be able to replace my Google Nest Detectors and remove the final Google and Amazon devices from my ecosystem.
Years ago a friend of the family had so many wifi issues, it’s gotten better but at the time the standard routers the ISP used to give to users were awful. I bought one of the last Apple wifi routers and it fixed all their issues.
I know it’s probably an industry they don’t want to be involved in, but it’s a shame. Their products were solid.
It’s a travesty Apple got out of wifi routers.. I bought a top of the line linksys wifi 6E router that needs to be restarted every 2 days 😭 fed up with that piece of junk.. 😤
I bought an AMPLIFI Alien at the start of the pandemic for reliable remote work. It doesn’t have 6E support, but in my mind it’s the closest thing to the old AirPort Extreme in user experience (e.g. “it just works, although it’s definitely not as configurable as many other things on the market” - but it does static dhcp leases, port forwards and separate 5 and 2.4ghz SSIDs etc), reliability (no need for constant reboots and shit. I Only reboot when there’s an update to install.. so run it like 4-6 months between reboots), and performance (solid speed everywhere, no weird IOT-devices dropping off Wi-Fi issues, no messing with my Sonos speakers etc), and it’s powerful and performant so that it covers my entire condo with great speeds, meaning I don’t have to worry about mesh solutions and inconsistent handovers, devices having a hard time deciding which mesh point they should be connected to etc. I’ve got a 300/300 fiber connection, and the router is never a bottleneck. Still do a lot of remote work, and no issues with video conferencing jitter or any other performance while my SO is streaming 4K/UHD or doing whatever she wants at the same time.
Unfortunately it’s also very Apple:esque when it comes to price. Still worth it, and I would buy a new one immediately if it failed, despite being the same hardware and despite not having 6E support.
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Their routers were superb!! They always worked, never needed to be restarted. I used mine for years and years until it finally broke.
I have an amp plugged into a 3.5 mm jack on my AirPort Express and I use it daily. I will be very sad when Apple drops its functionality.
IFYKYK, the Airpot was a AWESOME router.
AirPort was a great product line when the Wi-Fi market was new and competing products were clunky and hard to configure.
Now the market is mature and saturated, last year's $250 router is now $75, and everyone's cable/DSL modem comes with one built-in. It makes no economic sense for Apple to participate in that market because there's little that could differentiate their products from others.
We replaced ours with Google WiFi and been very happy with the results.
The Google WiFi is a mesh solution which is really the way to go in 2023, IMHO.
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