AirPort Base Stations: Will Apple Ever Return to Wi-Fi Router Market?

[Will Co]

They should've bought Ubiquity and really up their game for enterprise networking and compute offering but not VR is more important.

Great thinking. Apple integration with legendary Ubiquity performance and reliability. Would have been a great fit. And surely less costly and more profitable than the VR stuff. Although those Apple glasses sound interesting…

 

[EugW]

In case anyone was not aware, Ubiquiti was founded by an ex-Apple WiFi engineer.

 

[DailySlow]

I doubt that. Without some mind blowing leap in the technology it isn't worth it. HomePod on the other hand can run my house bridged to cable provider's nice router. If I can add it to my VPN supported devices all the better. My ancient Apple TV DOES run my VPN and as a HOME hub. NAS via HomePd would be a dream but not likely for cannibalizing iCloud. A thing that make this desirable is the system/device timely update ecosystem Apple customarily pushes. Something generic marketplace devices struggle with.

 

[DailySlow]

As I live in an 1815 house with horsehair walls that resist WiFi signals, I've relied on the Extreme and two Airport Expresses for years. So far they're working well, though lately there's sometimes a lag between the Xfinity modem and the Extreme. So I'm hoping for an upgraded system.

I hate that when it happens. My cousin lives in a 17th century house with stone walls at least two feet thick. Think you've got problems LOL.

 

[DailySlow]

It looks like one reason the iPads cant be hubs is that they need to be always on devices and Apple cant guarantee everyone using an iPad will leave it always on and connected. I think you can still use an iPad to control everything, it just cant be a hub.

I agree on that. I have one iPad and I cannot set it in the cupboard, setting to not shut down ever and let it Home hub it's little mind forever.

 

[DailySlow]

Yes, it's a classic information consumer issue with a bit of hardware you have fruitfully expended a lot of time getting familiar with – like an old friend from HS gone totally M**A, or a red AT&T rotary dial phone, or a three speed Chevy Nova, et. al. Like my old Motorola RAZR on the shelf, my stash of ZIP disks, and my 2004 iBook, warm things fade and the approaching things revive why you even got a Sinclair and then Apple IIE, then...

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

I'm honestly really surprised they've stayed away from this given the pricing I've seen on some mesh systems.

Some of these systems are nearly $2k ... at that price, surely Apple could figure out how to make it something worth their time?


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And how many people are jumping on an $1800 Wifi Mesh system? VERY FEW, I'd say.

Hardly anyone needs WiFi 7, which makes the cost hard to justify for most.

 

[teejaysplace24]

Airport made sense when Wi-Fi was an emerging technology and Apple had a vested interest in expanding that user base to support its own product roadmaps. But at this point, the technology is ubiquitous and there are plenty of other companies making routers on which Apple’s products run perfectly well. What incentive is there for them now to play around in a saturated product space with little prestige and slim profit margins?

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

Airport made sense when Wi-Fi was an emerging technology and Apple had a vested interest in expanding that user base to support its own product roadmaps. But at this point, the technology is ubiquitous and there are plenty of other companies making routers on which Apple’s products run perfectly well. What incentive is there for them now to play around in a saturated product space with little prestige and slim profit margins?

None. Which is why Apple abandoned their WiFi product line years ago. There is no margin and as we all know, Apple thrives on huge margins.

 

[erihp]

Airport made sense when Wi-Fi was an emerging technology and Apple had a vested interest in expanding that user base to support its own product roadmaps. But at this point, the technology is ubiquitous and there are plenty of other companies making routers on which Apple’s products run perfectly well. What incentive is there for them now to play around in a saturated product space with little prestige and slim profit margins?

Ensuring HomeKit and other Apple technologies like AirPlay, Airdrop (and the underlying protocol support required to) function properly? So many people have poor experiences with HomeKit, HomePods, Siri, because their network is bad.

That said, it doesn’t seem like they care too much about HomeKit.

I feel like an AppleTV could be positioned as wired ‘Airport extenders’/Airplay targets and some new HomeHub product could act as router/mesh ap/Homekit supervisor. This way the whole network stack is ‘Apple friendly’.

Probably too ambitious and not enough margin as this point.

 

[zach-coleman]

One of the things I think the market is almost completely lacking is routers that look acceptable to be out in the open. (Which is pretty important for 6Ghz) I think Google is the only company doing it. Besides that, I don’t think there’s much point besides something else to use their custom WiFi chip research on.

I’d love another Time Capsule, but I doubt it.

 

[jcshas]

It would be great if Apple would enter the market again, however I think most of us have moved on. I switched to Eero shortly after Apple pulled the plug on Airport base stations and have been very pleased with the decision.

 

[AgentOSX]

Yes, it's a classic information consumer issue with a bit of hardware you have fruitfully expended a lot of time getting familiar with – like an old friend from HS gone totally M**A, or a red AT&T rotary dial phone, or a three speed Chevy Nova, et. al. Like my old Motorola RAZR on the shelf, my stash of ZIP disks, and my 2004 iBook, warm things fade and the approaching things revive why you even got a Sinclair and then Apple IIE, then...

I have an Osborne.

 

[MaxEntropy]

Tim Cook is such a cheapskate that, despite Apple being one of the very richest companies in the world and thus having far more than enough money to hire new employees, he killed off the AirPort line to move those employees working on it to other projects.

Cook is a bean counter who only cares about maximizing profits. Unlike Steve Jobs, Cook doesn’t do what is best for customers. Cook does what is best for shareholders.

"Cook does what is best for shareholders" AND HIMSELF! Loved my Airport Extreme router until Apple silently (as usual...) quit patching security vulnerabilities.

 

[Astro7x]

I doubt it very highly but I would be all over them if they did. No routers were more reliable. I still use my 2013 extreme for Time Machine backups and one remaining 2012 express for AirPlay only.

Eh… completely anecdotal, but the WiFi component of my Time Capsule broke. Then I was essentially stuck with a very expensive router with a working Time Machine if it was plugged in directly to the computer. It made me rethink that combining the two devices wasn’t the best idea. Like if the drive inside failed, was it even user replaceable?

Is there any way to recreate a Time Capsule today where basically once a laptop connects to a WiFi network it connects to an external drive and starts a Time Machine backup? That was the coolest thing about it. And about the only way I could get my wife to reliably backup her laptop.

 

[Engender]

If the rumours are true that Apple will finally focus on the home, this is a big missed opportunity, especially when they had done WiFi networks before.

Right! Imagine the Apple walled-garden effect if they offered routers along side all of the automation stuff.

 

[Astro7x]

Tim Cook is such a cheapskate that, despite Apple being one of the very richest companies in the world and thus having far more than enough money to hire new employees, he killed off the AirPort line to move those employees working on it to other projects.

Cook is a bean counter who only cares about maximizing profits. Unlike Steve Jobs, Cook doesn’t do what is best for customers. Cook does what is best for shareholders.

When you have a trillion dollar company I really don’t understand why they don’t expand into more tech areas that keep you in the Apple ecosystem. There is really something to be said about how they brand things where the simplicity of their product line makes you feel like making a choice is simple. Even with routers, there was 3, and they were discontinued 7 or so years ago and I can still tell you what the differences are.

Meanwhile, I recently had to buy a new router and it just felt so overwhelming trying to figure out what the differences were between multiple models with some of which having no discernible differences within models from the same brand.

 

[Easybook]

wifi is hard to polish and the market is flooded with competition. That's why apple left it. Plus it would force them to make their devices bleeding edge, which is not the apple way.

 

[redpandadev]

Ubiquiti already makes everything apple would theoretically make and more. What could really get interesting is with Apple producing its own chip - THAT is something truly unique that cant be done elsewhere. If it were to license or partner that chip with Ubiquiti, something really special could happen. A number of ubiquiti equipment is limited in capability and/or design due to thermal limitations chipsets - both in wifi/wired networking and in APU limits. Apple has both and has solved for both.

 

[sbrhwkp3]

They're not going to develop a router. They're going to turn their existing products into routers. It makes sense, with HomePods or Apple TVs serving as smart home hubs, that they would want to add functionality and value to those products by allowing them to operate as routers. Especially the Apple TV, which is often placed in homes very close to the same location coax cable modems are located - inside of TV stands.

 

[Hildy]

Another offering for Apple+ would be VPN privacy built into a new AirPort system and using all of their other home hardware as access points…

 

[robd003]

I can't even imagine all of the support calls for a Wifi product

 

[norbinhouston]

Inthink there is still a market. Setting up a new wifi sytem is still pretty challenging to the normal person. Apple is good at software.

 

[zogzog]

Literally the only justification to buy an Apple router was, and remains, that you absolutely must have one with an Apple logo on it. The Time Capsules in particular dissipated heat extremely poorly, their performance overall was middling at best, the management interface was pretty but terrible, and at a time that the industry was rapidly churning technology, Apple (just as rapidly) fell behind with a slow update schedule and no communication about or timeline for supporting newer standards or urgency about security updates.

Apple has made a lot of decent peripherals that justified their higher price (various Apple monitors are a good example—Apple's early embrace of LCD was a boon. Even the Studio Display remains a decent option) Airports, other than perhaps the very earliest UFO-shaped ones that provided decent, accessible performance at a time when wifi hardware was still complex and expensive, were poorly designed and a poor value.

I couldn’t possibly care less that my Time Machine backup NAS was or wasn’t the fastest on the planet. What I do care about is that it does TM backups without me caring for it. And in that aspect, Time Capsule was, and still is, far superior to anything else available—plug in, set wifi password, direct Time Machine backups on each Mac to the device, done. I don’t know how valid your accusation of the heat problem on the Time Capsule is, but I have been using the vertical model since 2015 and the horizontal one since 2010, and haven’t had a problem with either all this time.

But no use crying over spilled milk. After reading the news that Apple will deprecate AFP and therefore Time Capsules, I’ve thrown in the towel and placed an order over the weekend for a Wi-Fi 6e router and a small NAS, on which I plan to install FreeNAS. I’m distinctly not happy about having to be a home sysadmin again—not having to do that is like half the point of using a Mac—but if I have to admin anything at all, I might as take it as an opportunity to re-learn my way around a modern Unix server OS and implement a real home server for a change.

 

[applefan8254]

If they do, can they make a hardware buttons that says and does something to the effect of "driveway wifi" that sets the settings to whatever is required to blast the Wi-Fi out to the driveway so cars can download software updates