Apple Ceases Development of 'AirPort' Wireless Routers as Engineers Reassigned to Other Products

[macintoshmac]

Geez, another friggin nail in the coffin.

As we are seeing him count beans for products that make the Apple experience, we will soon find Mr. Cook counting the cost of the nails he hammered into the Apple coffin.

 

[VenusianSky]

I never owned a Mac, but I have owned a Time Capsule since the first release. The only Apple product I even owned at the time was an iPod, but acquired the iPhone 3G shortly after. I thought the TC was innovative at the time. None of the major home router brands had a wifi router + built-in disk on the market. The sleek design and built-in antennas made it stand alone on appearance. I had some issues with Airport Utility for Windows early on, but they fixed those issues and it has been fine since. The TC has always been my primary backup device for my Windows desktop and notebook.

I bought the newer TC for a disk size upgrade and gave the old one to a friend. The original is still working as good today as when I bought it. It is too bad they will no longer be making them. I think it is a great product.

 

[burgman]

Idiots do that.

My .11n AEBS is quicker and more stable than my .11ac Virgin Media SuperHub and isn't reporting all of my network activity to my isp.

If that were only true. If you are in the USA your ISP has it by law. Idiots think they are smarter than others and boast about it... VPN, tunnels? got ya covered.

 

[TurboPGT!]

I'm loathing Apple at the moment, but I can't say this surprises me in the least. I've used Airport base stations exclusively for years. In my experience they are the easiest to set up, and the most stable to run, of any networking device I've used. I have them installed at home, my office, Indianapolis and Central America, and I never have a problem with them.

But let's face it: this is simply another step in Apple establishing what they think people should want/need. The Time Capsule, as helpful and useful as it is, doesn't fit with Cook's 'bleed them like a turnip' corporate mentality. We're only customers, not stockholders worth millions. As long as we'll continue to pay monthly subscription fees for everything, including music and iCloud backups, why in the world would they shoot themselves in the foot by offering a reliable piece of equipment that doesn't bring in guaranteed monthly income to Cupertino.

Seems like nearly every move Apple makes pushes me closer to the door.

I am a camel, and someday there will be that one straw...

This is blathering nonsense.

Everyone needs a router. Not everyone needs a Time Capsule.

Besides, Apple will likely continue to offer the current AirPorts for a long time, as there is NO reason to discontinue them and practically no reason to update them either. They are already spec'ed out to the needs of 99%.

The reason for closing the development division ( if its even true, this is just a rumor ) could mean no NEW AirPort products, which I"m not envisioning a need for any time in near or even distant future.

 

[A MacBook lover]

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.

Multiple lenses = computational

Most people might feel this notice isn't important, but it is, because it's the first real confirmation of our fears as Apple users. The fact is you bought an Apple router, then you went home, plugged it, and voila, all your Apple devices worked out of the box. Everything worked. And when there was any issue, it either autorepaired or was easily fixable with the airport app.

Then, someday you tried a third-party router because you thought Apple ones were too expensive. Configuration needed a laptop with an ethernet cable, then directing Explorer to the URL of the local network for accessing the router admin page. You set it up following the instructions, and of course, it failed. So you connected the laptop again, the ethernet cable again, and finally you were able to have it working after some hours searching the culprit setting.

And later, whenever your wifi network had an issue, you needed to plug the laptop again, the ethernet cable, etc, etc...

If we had asked the iToys fanboys about AirPort a few days ago, they would shout "don't worry, don't cry, they will stay". But reality is different.

Reality is the only safe dudes are the iToys fanboys. Any other Apple product (Mac included, of course) has a severely uncertain future. Of course iToys fanboys will disagree, but only after Apple comes with an explanation, and then they will agree. With an explanation in the lines of:

If you're so fearful for the safety of Mac, then go get a chrome book or any windows PC.


These 'iToys' are up among the biggest innovations in the last 100 years. Everyone has one of these toys now. They are not just toys. They're amazing supercomputers in your hand.

 

[9081094]

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 totally agree with all you've written. The company Apple has lost it's soul. It's gotten lazy, money focused and lagging on all fronts. I'm this close to abandon ship.

 

[Mildredop]

That's utter nonsense.

I agree. In my experience, Apple stuff has never "just worked".

 

[thealkimist]

Absolutely. Apple used to make all kinds of stuff that they don't make now. Printers, scanners, etc. And in some rights; the best ones on the market. However, some of the things they are cutting now are flirting dangerously close with severing that hardware and software relationship. No more Apple displays and routers actually does affect how I use my Mac, for example. The experience is not as good with my Dell 4k display as it was with my 1440p Apple Cinema Display (tis' just, unfortunately, outdated, and I need/want 4k). And so on and so forth...

Sadly, if enough people were buying these products, Apple would be keeping them. But you're also right, there was something special about the cinema displays and routers.

 

[Max Portakabin]

If that were only true. If you are in the USA your ISP has it by law. Idiots think they are smarter than others and boast about it...

Idiots completely miss the point and don't realise it in their rush to prove how stupid they are.

Hope this helps.

 

[weaverra]

Definitely not looking forward to debugging why my mac won't airplay to 1 out of 3 of my apple tvs when I'm forced in the future to replace my airports with some combination of third-party routers, access points, and bridges to support newfangled 802.11bq (or whatever the newest thing will be in a few years).

Air play works fine over other routers. It's not an airport feature. It has more to do with the devices on each end of the router.

 

[burgman]

Idiots completely miss the point and don't realise it in their rush to prove how stupid they are.

Hope this helps.

It does.... To prove my point...

 

[Mildredop]

I totally agree with all you've written. The company Apple has lost it's soul. It's gotten lazy, money focused and lagging on all fronts. I'm this close to abandon ship.

I'm also close, but when you actually look, there's nothing to jump to.

I've left iOS for Android, Apple TV for Chromecast and Airport Extreme for a TP-Link router. In every case, the product I've moved to has been considerably better than the Apple version (this is my opinion, of course).

But what alternatives are there to Macs for the average consumer? Windows or Chromebooks, neither of which compare to MacOS.

 

[MisterK]

Except the developers won't have high-end Macs anymore to write the software. No software - bye bye future sales. Apple is dying. They may be making money right now, but they are losing the long game right now.

What makes you think that an Apple laptop in 5 years won't be able to develop software?

 

[cmaier]

Air play works fine over other routers. It's not an airport feature. It has more to do with the devices on each end of the router.

No, it sure doesn't work fine all the time. Many routers interfere one way or another. These forums are full of people who have issues with airplay on linksys, asus, belkin, or other routers, then try an apple router and all is good.

I'm not saying you are guaranteed pain using a third-party router, but as evidenced from the hundreds of threads discussing problems, Apple routers have a much higher success rate. (I had my own issues with a linksys router. I believe a firmware update eventually fixed it, but by then I had moved on to airports)

 

[weaverra]

I'm also close, but when you actually look, there's nothing to jump to.

I've left iOS for Android, Apple TV for Chromecast and Airport Extreme for a TP-Link router. In every case, the product I've moved to has been considerably better than the Apple version (this is my opinion, of course).

But what alternatives are there to Macs for the average consumer? Windows or Chromebooks, neither of which compare to MacOS.

iOS has a better commercial development platform. If you rely on commercially available apps iOS is the way to go. Take Yamaha for instance. They have not and currently will not develop their stagemix app for their digital mixing consoles. Their reason was that Android is too unstable at this point. I don't see me jumping off the iOS train anytime soon.

 

[indychris]

This is blathering nonsense.

Everyone needs a router. Not everyone needs a Time Capsule.

Besides, Apple will likely continue to offer the current AirPorts for a long time, as there is NO reason to discontinue them and practically no reason to update them either. They are already spec'ed out to the needs of 99%.

The reason for closing the development division ( if its even true, this is just a rumor ) could mean no NEW AirPort products, which I"m not envisioning a need for any time in near or even distant future.

Well, at least I made it all the way up to blathering nonsense. Usually it's just plain nonsense.

I'm not claiming that people don't need a router, but they dropped their development division which demonstrates that it's no longer a priority.

I hope they do continue to sell them, as I use the Back to My Mac feature among others daily, and they can be easily configured using any iOS or Mac OS device. I have a number of them employed, so I'd love to see them continued.

 

[bluethunderrain]

Apple has dissolved its division which develops wireless routers and is now sending engineers who worked on the AirPort lineup into other product teams, including one currently working on Apple TV. The news comes from a report by Bloomberg, who said Apple has been slowly shutting down the division over the past year and made the decision "to try to sharpen the company's focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue."

Currently, Apple sells three wireless routers, including the AirPort Express ($99), AirPort Extreme ($199), and AirPort Time Capsule ($299), but none of the devices have seen a refresh since 2013. A temporary stock shortage earlier in the year gave hope that a refresh of the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule was coming during WWDC, but Apple never mentioned the products during its keynote. The trio of wireless routers still remain available for purchase for the time being.
The central reason for abandoning the AirPort line appears to focus mainly on its small revenue gains in comparison to the company's more lucrative products, like the iPhone. Apple includes its routers in the "other products" category of its annual financial results, a section which generated $11.1 billion in fiscal 2016, or about 5 percent of the company's total sales.

Article Link: Apple Ceases Development of 'AirPort' Wireless Routers as Engineers Reassigned to Other Products

MAN I miss Steve Jobs!!! He's probably crying in his grave right now.... They are really losing their Apple'ness!

 

[Botts85]

Absolutely. Apple used to make all kinds of stuff that they don't make now. Printers, scanners, etc. And in some rights; the best ones on the market. However, some of the things they are cutting now are flirting dangerously close with severing that hardware and software relationship. No more Apple displays and routers actually does affect how I use my Mac, for example. The experience is not as good with my Dell 4k display as it was with my 1440p Apple Cinema Display (tis' just, unfortunately, outdated, and I need/want 4k). And so on and so forth...

Losing the routers will be a huge loss, especially with how nicely they passed through all of Apple's iCloud features with no need to manually set up port forwarding or firewalls. Back to My Mac is freaking amazing.

It is also a huge loss for any of us who support family members with Macs. The Airports just worked -- for years. Occasionally reboots might be required every couple of months, but other than that, plug it in and forget it. Airport USB Printer Sharing lead to far, far more user friendly wireless printing than anything built into a printer. I now understand why Airprint never got added to it though.

On the displays side, the new LG/Apple collaboration displays looks pretty freaking awesome. Certainly more functional for a TB Mac than the Cinema Displays ever were. And significantly cheaper.

 

[thespacekid]

Too bad but not surprising since they've done little to improve it in the past year or two. I liked it mainly because I could use FindMyMac and share drives. Hopefully other routers are better now.

 

[cmaier]

Well, at least I made it all the way up to blathering nonsense. Usually it's just plain nonsense.

I'm not claiming that people don't need a router, but they dropped their development division which demonstrates that it's no longer a priority.

I hope they do continue to sell them, as I use the Back to My Mac feature among others daily, and they can be easily configured using any iOS or Mac OS device. I have a number of them employed, so I'd love to see them continued.

Let's hope they've simply been reassigned into the "home hub" product that will replace airports with Alexa-like functionality.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

This company gets worse every day. I am thinking about quitting to buy Apple products.

 

[weaverra]

No, it sure doesn't work fine all the time. Many routers interfere one way or another. These forums are full of people who have issues with airplay on linksys, asus, belkin, or other routers, then try an apple router and all is good.

I'm not saying you are guaranteed pain using a third-party router, but as evidenced from the hundreds of threads discussing problems, Apple routers have a much higher success rate. (I had my own issues with a linksys router. I believe a firmware update eventually fixed it, but by then I had moved on to airports)

My 5th gen AE choked and error ed out with Airplay all the time. Never worked correctly. My new Linksys 7400 works flawless.

 

[Stella]

Disappointing. The Mac related products continue to disappear. :-( The Express and Time capsule where great. The Capsule - it just worked with Backups and restores.

Next on the line is Mac Mini and Pros.

I don't remember such a stream of Apple negative news stories....

 

[weaverra]

Losing the routers will be a huge loss, especially with how nicely they passed through all of Apple's iCloud features with no need to manually set up port forwarding or firewalls. Back to My Mac is freaking amazing.

Teamviewer. You can control your Mac from any iOS device or computer even through a web browser.

 

[TurboPGT!]

Well, at least I made it all the way up to blathering nonsense. Usually it's just plain nonsense.

I'm not claiming that people don't need a router, but they dropped their development division which demonstrates that it's no longer a priority.

I hope they do continue to sell them, as I use the Back to My Mac feature among others daily, and they can be easily configured using any iOS or Mac OS device. I have a number of them employed, so I'd love to see them continued.

Indeed, I'm sure we'll see them remain on shelves for years to come. They are still the best of their kind on the market.

Considering the fact that nothing new is needed, thats a good reason to move staff onto other projects.