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Apple Discontinues Its AirPort Router Line (9to5mac.com)
9to5Mac reports that Apple is officially exiting the wireless router business and selling off its remaining inventory of AirPort products. This includes the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and both models of the AirPort Time Capsule. "We're discontinuing the Apple AirPort base station products," Apple said in a statement to 9to5Mac. "They will be available through Apple.com, Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last." From the report: While the news is disappointing for fans of Apple's routers, the end of the AirPort line is no surprise either. Bloomberg reported back in November 2016 that Apple had disbanded the team responsible for developing Apple's routers, and in January 9to5Mac was first to report that Apple Stores started selling third-party. At the time, Apple told us that its AirPort line would remain -- with the mesh Wi-Fi routers adding a solution for larger homes: "People love our AirPort products and we continue to sell them. Connectivity is important in the home and we are giving customers yet another option that is well suited for larger homes."
So what becomes of orphaned technologies like Time Machine and AirPlay? Do they plan to finally license them out to other vendors?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
It's unfortunate that Apple didn't make a bigger deal / better known publicity of the feature set of its Airports. Did you know that they have the ability to create extended mesh networks by linking up multiple units, just like overpriced overhyped stuff that some startups are hawking in the last 2 years? It has covered my home like a charm, and you can find used ones for ~$30.
Nice to see another brand of highly overpriced routers fold up. There are much more flexible and cheaper alternatives.
Yes, less alternatives is ALWAYS better for the consumer.
Fucking idiot.
Things Apple has added:
Emoji Bar
Dongles
Watch Bands
Earbuds that need to be thrown out when the batteries degrade
Keyboards and mice that need to be thrown out when the batteries degrade
Things Apple killed recently
Airport
Time capsule
Airports
Cinema Displays and displays with matte finishes
Headphone Jacks
USB Ports
MagSafe
iPods
SD Card Readers
Wired mice and wired keyboards
Machines with PCI cards
Things that are effectively dead
Mac Mini
Mac Pro
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
"default credentials are the most likely cause"
"Things cleared up when both Anubhav found users complaining on the MikroTik forums about defaced devices, admitting they were using default or no credentials."
"Looks like somebody made a script that logs into unprotected devices and changes the identity name," said a MikroTik spokesperson. "[MikroTik] RouterOS devices do have a password and firewall by default, but many remove those for unknown reasons."
Totally the manufacturers fault.
Nice to see another brand of highly overpriced routers fold up.
While the Airport might indeed be essentially an overpriced router, the Time Machine is pure genius.
Essentially it's a hard drive attached to a router, but it will seamlessly set up backups for your macbook.
If your disk gets hosed, you can restore almost everything, with diffs taken something like every hour.
While some /.'ers might point out the ability to do this with cheaper hardware and rolling your own using rsync, I defy you to find a similarly simple solution.
Literally I just told my parents to buy a time machine, and their mac is backed up. Nothing else I need to do, brain dead simple!
A little known fact is that you can AirPlay to an Airport Express and it'll output digital PCM to whatever's on the other side. I have a bunch of them feeding into different stereos all over the house, for cheap whole-home audio. Pretty good for a $30 device (used).
When will a new proprietary W1/Bluetooth network protocol for Apple devices be announced?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Nice to see another brand of highly overpriced routers fold up. There are much more flexible and cheaper alternatives.
I disagree with the sentiment. I have two airport expresses, and frankly they're wonderful. One of them is plugged in behind the Bose and has a cable running to the aux input of the Bose. With an easy touch of a button I can easily play music from my iphone or laptops to the Bose. That's been a nice feature. And, yes, I know about bluetooth, but I was doing this 10 years ago.
The other one was useful back when internet was spotty in hotels years ago. I always traveled (and still do) with the airport express and a short ethernet cable. If wifi is unable or sucks but a wired connection is available, I plug that thing in and have wifi. It's the size of a macbook charger, so it's easy to take along.
Do you have ESP?
This is really too bad, because the Airport line were fantastic routers, and had a pile of functionality that you can't easily get in any other package.
Back int he mid 2000s, the "flying saucer" routers were designed with institutional use in mind, supporting up to 50 simultaneous connections. They were one of the first home routers that provided IPv6 functionality, both native and tunnelled, right out of the box. They support the Bonjour Sleep Proxy service (I'm not aware of any other router that does), permitting Bonjour services for devices that switch to a low-power mode, along with wide-area Bonjour that can automatically register hosts and their services with a suitable DNS (akin to dynamic DNS, but with services as well). The Expresses have excellent Airplay support, accepting streaming Apple Lossless audio and outputting via either standard analog or digital optical. And the Time Capsules have out-of-the-box support for TimeMachine backups.
They are also very easy to mesh together, and have had it for fifteen years now. The configuration tool will even dynamically generate a connection diagram for all your Airport devices, showing how they interconnect (and whether connections are wired or wireless).
All in all, great routers for the money. I know of no other routers that provide all of these features in one box. Hopefully Apple will partner with someone so we don't lose Bonjour Sleep Proxy and wide-area Bonjour support in particular. And at least my existing installations will continue to work for many years yet. Still a bit of a sad day -- Apple used to be ahead of the curve, but let the market slip past them.
Yaz
The are not cheap, but after going through several iterations of "home" routers, Linksys, Belkin, Netgear... you name it. Had to reboot them constantly, only some stuff would successfully connect. None of them were reliable. Most died within a year. Dropped connections. hung connections.. you name it. I hate Windows, and Linux won't run everything I need for work, so I bought a Mac. VERY reliable. I finally got fed up and decided maybe ... just maybe I might find something that 'just works'... I bought an Airport out of desperation. My Apple router is almost 10 years old. It has crashed once after lightning caused a power spike that was strong enough to cause the Power suppression unit it is plugged into to clamp the circuit. I have yet to find a single device that failed to connect. I haven't rebooted it since the last security update. I, for one, am sad to see them exit the market leaving it to the 'cheaper alternatives'. Maybe the EdgeMax UniFi might work.
While some /.'ers might point out the ability to do this with cheaper hardware and rolling your own using rsync, I defy you to find a similarly simple solution.
You don't even need to "roll your own r-sync" anything. You can set up an AFP share on a FreeNAS server and point Time Machine to it. You might need to configure user permissions for the machines to access the dataset they back up to, but it's a pretty easy one-time thing, and you can make a homemade "Time Capsule" this way with redundant hot-swappable disks through ZFS. A more robust backup solution than Apple's appliance.
You can set up an AFP share on a FreeNAS server and point Time Machine to it. You might need to configure user permissions for the machines to access the dataset they back up to
I think you just proved his point.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
That was just the first Google hit. MikroTik in particular have a long, long history of 0day in their firmware.
A quick search in the CVE database shows that MicroTik with all their products combined have the same number of vulnerabilities than the AirportExtreme alone, and the number is 7. You're full of shit, fanboi.
lucm, indeed.
This does sound a lot like a certain type of Linux user that always claims to do something better with a few scripts and poking at /proc, all while claiming it's "simple". Yes, if you're a power user, go ahead (I do use linux). But sometimes it's nice to just plug something in and have it work. So I'm going to go visit my mom in a few weeks, and one of those chores will be to backup her windows computer again, and I wish it were as easy as backing up my Mac at work.
Bluetooth audio is still laggy AF. I think AirPlay via WiFi is way better, that's why I love my Airplay Express router. If you play back the Auido from even an old Apple TV (mine is 2nd or 3rd gen) via AirPlay it does it flawlessly, perfectly in sync.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
One of them is plugged in behind the Bose
Of course it is. You need to hook an overpriced sound system to an overpriced Airplay receiver.
The Airport line were a victim of their own success.
The people posting here about their personal experiences with Airports (myself included) all have similar stories.
They tried several other routers which had a wide variety of problems. They then bought an Airport ~10 years ago and everything has been perfect since.
You can't build a business like Apple's on single purchases unless the word of mouth was incredible. Unfortunately people don't discuss buying routers all that much. They just go to a store and buy one.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Apple entered the wireless access point market because it wasn't competitive. There were few players and there was a big premium for 802.11g parts (many of which were crap), and Apple wanted to sell support for 802.11g as a feature on the PowerBooks. This feature was largely worthless if the expensive 802.11g WiFi interface on the laptop was always running in downgraded 802.11b-compatible mode. Something similar happened with 802.11n. By the time 802.11ac came along, the market was competitive enough that there was no need for Apple to do anything: if they did nothing, people were still able to get 802.11ac working well. In addition, 802.11ac was much less of a selling point. The jump from .11b to .11g was the difference between nice toy for demos and generally useful. The jump from .11g to .11n meant that the WiFi was typically not the bottleneck for most users. The jump to .11ac means that WiFi is even less of a bottleneck, but it's well past the point where most people care.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
My story is similar. Though I haven't used any of our Macs in years, the Airport Extreme that I parked next to the cable modem has been chugging away for about a decade with no downtime. Same for the Express which we were using to stream ages ago. I only wish my "business class" routers at my office lasted as long.
Maybe the longevity is the problem because they don't need to be replaced. With no Jobs riding everyone, they've gone cheap. We already know the phones don't last, the laptops don't last, and now Apple is killing off one of their rare but not-so-sexy products which actually lasts.
Make love, not reality television.
Apple in Bose in the same sentence. I hope you used Monster cables to connect all of these.