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Apple Ceases Development of 'AirPort' Wireless Routers as Engineers Reassigned to Other Products
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I thought when Airport Utility was lobotomised and brought to iOS a few years back it was a sign of life in the range, but alas not.
Time Capsule and Airport Express are in daily use here and I would absolutely pay for an Apple branded upgrade, as they have been rock solid and fast.
They would also wake a Mac Mini on wireless, which at the time nothing else could. Not sure if that's still true though.
Time Capsule and Airport Express are in daily use here and I would absolutely pay for an Apple branded upgrade, as they have been rock solid and fast.
They would also wake a Mac Mini on wireless, which at the time nothing else could. Not sure if that's still true though.
If what you said made any sense, why aren't a whole bunch of loser companies coming out with loser products that compete with Apple's not getting sued every time their products tank? Or a company like Samsung, that makes all sorts of products, some of which are very niche and never go anywhere? Or Microsoft continually selling products at a loss? If Apple kept making products knowing it would keep losing money maybe your argument would make a tiny bit of sense.
A surprising announcement. If this was a move of paring down the product line so that they can do better on existing products, then I might be okay with it, but they are speculatively going in directions that I don't necessary agree with, and spending far too much energy moving towards "throw-away consumer appliances" rather than the best computer lineup on the market.
There are plenty of decent routers on the market, but you need to spend about the same as you would on an AirPort router to get the best quality. The cheap routers really are cheap and low-quality.
There are plenty of decent routers on the market, but you need to spend about the same as you would on an AirPort router to get the best quality. The cheap routers really are cheap and low-quality.
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What's going on? Is Apple deliberately trying to piss off customers? The convenient MagSafe is gone, SD card slot gone, headphone jack gone, optical SPDIF on 4th Apple TV gone.
Next things to kill: OTA Time Capsule backups and AirPlay... oh c'mon Apple. My sympathy is shrinking!
The reason why many loyal customers like(d) Apple was the huge convenience factor and reliability within a smart ecosystem.
Supplementary products such as AirPort Time Capsule, the 3rd gen Apple TV, and the Apple Thunderbolt Display surely didn't generate a lot of revenue, but completed the unique Apple experience at home and in the office. If you didn't want to fiddle around with 3rd party support and drivers (like in the PC world), you just bought everything from Apple, and you knew that everything would work smoothly – because it was Apple.
But now things are changing, the convenience factor has been significantly disturbed with the latest #donglelife backlash and ugly LG monitors on top of that. Not to mention the never-the-same Space Gray (gone Jet Black) color-rama-drama.
I beginn to miss a central theme – a leitmotif – across the latest Apple products. The harmony is falling apart. While e.g. Microsoft is currently hard working on just that: unification. Be careful Apple... Nokia was once big too! Don't let the bean counters kill the company we used to love.
I regularly read these forums but usually do not respond. However, the long wait and then disappointment of the MacBook Pro update, and now this news about discontinuing Time Capsule and Airport Express forces me to express my extreme dismay at Apple and its recent decisions!
I have been a happy and proud user of Apple products for over 30 years! I have used a variety of Apple desktop computers, printers (when Apple made real hardware), laptops, and wireless devices over that time and, in general, have been very satisfied. With some chagrin, I admit that I do not use a cell phone but have an iPhone 3 (for emergencies). However, the ever-changing drift of Apple to IOS and it silliness of features, and the apparent lack of attention to "pro" users (meaning those of us who use Apple products in their professional lives) leads me to despair concerning my future with computing through a company whose mottos included "it just works" and "plug and play". The core Apple users are a dying bred I am afraid.
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What's going on? Is Apple deliberately trying to piss off customers? The convenient MagSafe is gone, SD card slot gone, headphone jack gone, optical SPDIF on 4th Apple TV gone.
Next things to kill: OTA Time Capsule backups and AirPlay... oh c'mon Apple. My sympathy is shrinking!
The reason why many loyal customers like(d) Apple was the huge convenience factor and reliability within a smart ecosystem.
Supplementary products such as AirPort Time Capsule, the 3rd gen Apple TV, and the Apple Thunderbolt Display surely didn't generate a lot of revenue, but completed the unique Apple experience at home and in the office. If you didn't want to fiddle around with 3rd party support and drivers (like in the PC world), you just bought everything from Apple, and you knew that everything would work smoothly – because it was Apple.
But now things are changing, the convenience factor has been significantly disturbed with the latest #donglelife backlash and ugly LG monitors on top of that. Not to mention the never-the-same Space Gray (gone Jet Black) color-rama-drama.
I beginn to miss a central theme – a leitmotif – across the latest Apple products. The harmony is falling apart. While e.g. Microsoft is currently hard working on just that: unification. Be careful Apple... Nokia was once big too! Don't let the bean counters kill the company we used to love.
Amen!
I regularly read these forums but usually do not respond. However, the long wait and then disappointment of the MacBook Pro update, and now this news about discontinuing Time Capsule and Airport Express forces me to express my extreme dismay at Apple and its recent decisions!
I have been a happy and proud user of Apple products for over 30 years! I have used a variety of Apple desktop computers, printers (when Apple made real hardware), laptops, and wireless devices over that time and, in general, have been very satisfied. With some chagrin, I admit that I do not use a cell phone but have an iPhone 3 (for emergencies). However, the ever-changing drift of Apple to IOS and it silliness of features, and the apparent lack of attention to "pro" users (meaning those of us who use Apple products in their professional lives) leads me to despair concerning my future with computing through a company whose mottos included "it just works" and "plug and play". The core Apple users are a dying bred I am afraid.
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Good then. Right now I have a Time Capsule, but no HDD has infinite life span, so I'm just thinking about what to do when the Time Capsule HDD dies.
I really loved the simplicity of the Apple routers and their performance with Apple products, but I always felt their advanced user features were a bit lacking and of all the routers I've owned it was the one which needed to be rebooted regularly in order to keep it working. I've lost count of the number of times over the years where there was some strange internet routing problem and I traced it back to the Apple router.
I don't recall the exact brands, but some third-party routers are really smart about their setup process, and the process works on Mac, too. Connect wirelessly to the router for the first time, and it walks you through a step-by-step setup process, very similar to how AirPort Utility functions.
Still not the same elegance as AirPort-branded solutions, but one advantage is that third-party routers typically don't dumb-down the configuration like Apple does. More of the power settings are available for tweaking.
They'd better do it very quickly then, because Amazon's Echo (with Alexa) is rapidly devouring that market space. And, as much as it pains me to say so, deservedly so. Amazon got voice-controlled AI right, and makes Siri look dated and failing - sorry, dear, age takes it's toll
I can't tell you how many times I cursed Siri for completely misinterpreting my instructions - only to have it promptly misinterpret my cursing and do something else I didn't want - like starting a FaceTime call with my neighbor Kyle when I called it an effing piece of crap. Still funny every time I think about it (no offense, Kyle), but very sad at the same time.
Truth be told, I no longer bother with Siri at this point... it's become more efficient NOT to use it.
So, I'd gladly support such a universal hub (though not without moaning about the fact that I just replaced both my Apple TVs for the new models this year), but it would have to work well and it needs to be soon or face impenetrable market dominance by Amazon.
The prevalence of iOS devices dictates that Apple should rapidly and aggressively pursue such a device (or line of devices), but I'm not sure what they're thinking these days.
Force touch's functionality was replicated in a backwards compatible way by long press in Android phones.
Haptic is actually useful and Apple has done a great job of that on their trackpads. OTOH, they've made the iPhone Home button worse.
AR - Will believe it when I see it. Besides, other companies have a head start (to be fair, Apple, unlike others, doesn't reveal in development products, but I feel if they had made significant progress we would have heard some rumors. Apple's struggled to keep the rumor machine quiet over the last few years).
Computational Photography - I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you're talking about tagging photos, etc, Google, MS, Facebook all sis that better and before Apple. And if you're talking about iPhone cameras, again, their competitors are as good, if not better.
They probably should have waited until after the holidays to do this. I was going to buy one just this weekend, but not now. Can't afford to put any more resources in unsupported hardware.
This could be a sign that Apple is planning to replace the AirPort router lineup with a "Smart Home Hub"... a single device that offers the wireless router functionality plus built-in Siri and HomeKit. Please let be a reality, as not everyone wants an Apple TV to be the hub.
This is one of the most ominous things I've seen posted to MacRumors since I started reading here in 2005. And it is made more ominous by recent events.
Other companies make WiFi base stations. Other companies make displays. Apple's success is based in gestalt: The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
When you buy a $3000+ computer, you used to be able to easily pick up a matching display and stupid simple, reliable router that works right out of the box. Because you spent so much on a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 7, an iPad Pro, an Apple Watch, and an Apple TV 4, Apple should provide you with things that help complete the experience because that is what Apple does: They craft experiences. The "it just works" phrase that has brought Apple so much success wasn't just a saying, however it is often said sarcastically over the past few years. If it weren't for the incompetence of Samsung, as well as Microsoft for many years, Apple would look like an even bigger joke. The climate right now is ripe for a new, young company to come along and shake things up.
Accessories are extremely important. Just because you don't see the benefit when you look at the balance sheet for your $200 router (which, by the way, many companies would kill for those margins), doesn't mean that it won't affect the balance sheet of your other product lines in the long term. When you begin decentralizing your experience, you run the risk of making it easier for users to switch to competing platforms. "Who cares if I buy an ugly Windows machine? It matches my ugly monitor and router, and quite frankly its easier to setup the router on Windows." Ok, that might not be an example that will push many people away from Macs. But it adds up over time. All the little paper cuts here and there push you out of the experience and makes you disillusioned with the ecosystem.
Unfortunately I think it's time to face the reality of the situation: Apple wants to kill the Mac. The Mac Pro and Mac Mini are horribly out of date and now they're no longer making displays or routers—although the routers thing really baffles me because all of my iOS devices are running on my home AirPort Extreme. I can understand why they would want to kill it. They want to get iPad sales back up and start having professionals use those instead. The problem is the software on the iPad sucks for professional use, and while the hardware is quickly catching up it still has a way to go for many users—especially for thing like RAM and GPU performance for OpenCL applications. The Mac is the workhorse that gets things done in the creative industry. It pushes forward iOS development. Killing it makes absolutely no sense to me for at least the next 5-10 years.
Other companies make WiFi base stations. Other companies make displays. Apple's success is based in gestalt: The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
When you buy a $3000+ computer, you used to be able to easily pick up a matching display and stupid simple, reliable router that works right out of the box. Because you spent so much on a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 7, an iPad Pro, an Apple Watch, and an Apple TV 4, Apple should provide you with things that help complete the experience because that is what Apple does: They craft experiences. The "it just works" phrase that has brought Apple so much success wasn't just a saying, however it is often said sarcastically over the past few years. If it weren't for the incompetence of Samsung, as well as Microsoft for many years, Apple would look like an even bigger joke. The climate right now is ripe for a new, young company to come along and shake things up.
Accessories are extremely important. Just because you don't see the benefit when you look at the balance sheet for your $200 router (which, by the way, many companies would kill for those margins), doesn't mean that it won't affect the balance sheet of your other product lines in the long term. When you begin decentralizing your experience, you run the risk of making it easier for users to switch to competing platforms. "Who cares if I buy an ugly Windows machine? It matches my ugly monitor and router, and quite frankly its easier to setup the router on Windows." Ok, that might not be an example that will push many people away from Macs. But it adds up over time. All the little paper cuts here and there push you out of the experience and makes you disillusioned with the ecosystem.
Unfortunately I think it's time to face the reality of the situation: Apple wants to kill the Mac. The Mac Pro and Mac Mini are horribly out of date and now they're no longer making displays or routers—although the routers thing really baffles me because all of my iOS devices are running on my home AirPort Extreme. I can understand why they would want to kill it. They want to get iPad sales back up and start having professionals use those instead. The problem is the software on the iPad sucks for professional use, and while the hardware is quickly catching up it still has a way to go for many users—especially for thing like RAM and GPU performance for OpenCL applications. The Mac is the workhorse that gets things done in the creative industry. It pushes forward iOS development. Killing it makes absolutely no sense to me for at least the next 5-10 years.
I've been very pro-Apple, even through the apocalyptic comments regarding the new MacBook Pros (which, by the way, I'm super happy with mine), and I can even forgive the exit of the monitor business since they've worked will with LG to integrate technologies like FaceTime cameras and brightness controls in to LG's offerings. So I can only hope Apple also helps 3rd party vendors integrate "point and click" Time Machine setup in to their wifi routers since I believe it's a major factor in keeping people's machines properly backed up.
I still believe in Apple as a company and as a philosophy, but really hope they choose to not contract their offerings any further. The Apple product ecosystem can't flourish without an actual ecosystem of products! And I think we all know that often (but not always) 3rd party offerings fall short. Sometimes they're better. But Apple shouldn't exit markets until such time that the other products are actually better. In the case of easy to use wifi routers, I'm not sure that's true.
I still believe in Apple as a company and as a philosophy, but really hope they choose to not contract their offerings any further. The Apple product ecosystem can't flourish without an actual ecosystem of products! And I think we all know that often (but not always) 3rd party offerings fall short. Sometimes they're better. But Apple shouldn't exit markets until such time that the other products are actually better. In the case of easy to use wifi routers, I'm not sure that's true.
News like this is solidifying my plans to build an Intel NUC running windows 10 because I can't justify the Apple tax for their old Mac hardware knowing the benefits are so few and far between anymore. I see where Apple is going and I'm going to ride the iOS wave with my iPad/iPhone/Apple tv but unless the Mac mini is updated dramatically (comparable to the skull canyon NUC) I don't think I'll be giving Apple money for a Mac again.
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I think some people are referring to the ability that allows you to plug in any speaker system on earth and turn in into a wifi airplay device. Airport Express is dead. So now your only choice is to buy a system that has airplay built in.
Why would you mention that other routers have hard drives? That is what a Time Capsule IS! You can also just use the USB port (yes they have one of those as well) to connect a drive for Time Machine which is what I do so I can choose the size of drive. You can actually even use the previous generation AirPort Extreme for Time Machine as well if you trick the computer. I haven't shopped for a router in awhile but a couple years ago they were near the top for single router performance, maybe things have changed by now. FYI not trying to be snarky, just wanting to correct misconceptions.
Oh for GOD'S SAKE. It's a business, not a soup kitchen. And exactly what insight do you personally have into the sales figures of Airports vs. the salaries for all the engineers, supply chain, support, and inventory that you can make a declarative statement on whether or not they are losing money?
It's more about the drip drip drip of changes rather than a sudden moment.
For me, I used to be completely Apple, but slowly I've been forced to look elsewhere:
- iPhone to Android because the iPhone refused to embrace the move to larger screens
- Apple TV to Chromecast because the ATV was limited, they removed the HDD and always called it a "hobby" so I was reluctant to continue to invest such large sums, plus the Chromecast was a tenth of the price.
- Airport Extreme to TP-Link because I hated the new design and they still needed an external modem.
- iTunes to Google Play Music.
I was ready to update my MacBook Pro but just don't like the new one. I'm looking at other options (XPS13 and the black laptop whose name escapes me right now).
They've almost completely lost me as a customer. I wonder how many others are on that path. Apple need to be careful - once the rot sets in, it's hard to turn things around (look at Nokia and BlackBerry for example).
True.
But it's also a phrasing thing.
You know ... news title...
Either way it can be both...
I just hope they won't kill Airport for good.