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Apple Abandons Development of Wireless Routers, To Focus On Products That Return More Profit (bloomberg.com)
Apple has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers in a move that further sharpens the company's focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, Bloomberg reports. From the article:Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV. Apple hasn't refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn't currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. Routers are access points that connect laptops, iPhones and other devices to the web without a cable. Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule. The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers.
My favorite AirPort-ism is that in order to apply port forwarding changes, you have to restart the entire router.
That's really all you need to know about how they're designed. Setting up a port forward is hard enough (you have to use a special Apple program to do it, there is no browser-based interface), and then to apply the newly forwarded port the entire router needs to reboot.
Hope you remembered to set the IP on the forwarded device to be static, or you're going to have a lot of reboots in your future.
agreed i should have been clearer, as someone who is admining. they are a pain. they are great for a user once configed tho.
everytime i have to swap one out i have alot more work to do because apple thinks a MAC address check when connecting to an access point is a good idea (and it is in locations where someone can spoof a network easily) but when swapping out a bunch its either reflash wifi profiles on a number of devices, or change the network name due to mac not matching
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
right now i find the easiest to work with are for a plig and play option i like the netgear nighthawk line. and for a little more customability (not to say the nighthawk cant be customized i simply have not done any) I like the linksys wrt 1900AC flashed with tomato
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The "flashed with tomato" part is key. I find the default Linksys router's stock firmware to be worse than useless. Alternately, I find the newer Asus routers (the ones that can update online) to be flexible out of the box without needing to be flashed
The only wireless router I've ever owned that didn't need to be rebooted all the time (or ever) and didn't have weird compatibility problems with certain clients that needed their wifi toggled to fix weird performance and latency issues. Yes, you can complain about the configuration and interface, but you do that like once, and the rest of the time you hope to leave the thing alone.
Now - where can I buy a router this isn't full of sales gimmicks and just works right? Clearly going to the high-end of consumer routers doesn't cover that.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush