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

[cmaier]

This will suck if true. Before switching to apple routers it seems like I had to reboot my routers every week to keep things working.

No more time capsule? No remote speakers and printers?

I have a complicated setup involving several airports in my house. A couple bridges, a wifi repeater, etc. It's great to be able to pull up the diagram in the app to see what's going on, or to be able to save a configuration and load it into another one (even a different model) to swap things around. Even upgrading to a new model was super easy since it detects the existing setup and asks if you want it to load the configuration.

Once the next big 802.11 improvement happens, will be a real pain to upgrade with some other brand of router.

 

[UKgaryb]

This sucks, Apple make the best wifi ap's available, they are still one of the few consumer/pro ap's that can do zero handoff properly.

 

[thealkimist]

Whaaat???

I understand why they shut down their display business (though I'm not happy with it) because apart from design, they couldn't really make a difference in the display business.

But the AirPort, and especially the Time Capsule, really made a difference. I've never had a backup system that worked more smoothly and without any maintenance at all than my Time Capsule.

Sad day. Again.

iCloud is the alternative to Time Capsule and I have a feeling its adoption has far exceeded the purchases of Time Capsules. But I am definitely sad about Airport Express being discontinued.

 

[iTeachMath]

I was waiting for a refresh to buy a new time capsule. I will probably buy the current gen. one.

Apple seems to be slowly killing off things I actually use.

 

[ugru]

So basically everyting that is accounted for less than 5% of their revenues is going for the chop...

Next in line: Mac Mini and MacPro

 

[BeefCake 15]

I think the desktops are next. Apple really should license MacOS to another vendor at this point. I would be happy if Microsoft or even Google bought MacOS.

I understand your frustration and you may be ranting but:

M$ can barely get their own OS that they built themselves to work right most of the time...Oh btw, M$ just joined the Linux foundation

Google has Linux/BSD variants to grab and tweak all they want, don't need macOS to build a desktop/notebook OS....Instead they chose the ChromeOS that only works through the "Cloud" functionality, not interested at all it seems.

 

[jpn]

I think they are a little too focused on producing books that no one needs and a MacBook Pro that isn't very Pro. Apple is slowly decaying, I can't stand this.

Time Capsule was such a handy device that just worked.

to be fair, yes, in the last 2 or so years it really has just worked.
before that however there were frequent problems that could be fixed if you knew how to, but not through the interfaces that apple itself provided.

 

[Max Portakabin]

If I'm going to mess about with a third party router, I might as well go the whole hog mess about with a cheaper computer.

 

[atikalz]

So what have these engineers done the last 3 years?

 

[andy.ringwood]

Meh. Who cares? This product probably makes up 0.00001% of their revenue. They have more important things to focus on.

Cue Apple are Doomed posts...

 

[iMcLovin]

Seems apple is killing off or abandoning more and more of what is not their main income product lines. Display, airport, mac pro & Mac mini (not official yet). But they are breaking off the ecosystem, and customers that buys apple for the streamlined feeling. I switched to PC, my next router will then not be apple, I wonder how long it will be before I start sniffing at other phone brands too...not long, unless iPhone 8 is something seriously exciting. There might not be much left I want from apple anymore TBH.

 

[41qser]

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.

Agreed 100%. So disappointing!

 

[brentsg]

I had a Apple Router for a few years then I bought the Asus AC68U and it blow it away in every way. Price, features and speed. Not sure what everyone is talking about Airplay, works just fine without a Apple Router

You could plug an Express into any stereo system and boom, it was Airplay. You didn't need an Airplay device. You could have several of these attached to any speakers and play music in sync.

 

[irishv]

It'd would be one thing if they were cutting departments to focus on creating better core products. At least then I could be satisfied with the performance of what they're putting out. As it stands, however, OS 10 offered me nothing but additional clicks to do the same thing (ie. command center->airplay), and my 2016 rMB is pretty but takes forever to wake from sleep (with no way to tell if it is on or off as there are no light indicators).

I moved my photo library to Lightroom when they killed Aperture. I moved my movies and music to Synology's Video and Audio Station packages when they moved personal libraries out of the main screens on Apple TV and the iOS Music app. At this point there is nothing I need a Mac for -> everything I do with my personal machines can be done with Windows.

The iPhone 7 was the first upgrade I skipped as it offered little new features for me. Now that my company supports Android @ Work, I'm seriously considering switching over next year.

I have 5 Airport Express boxes connected to in-ceiling speakers for whole home audio. They're all connected to an older Time Capsule that is finally dying. I was just starting to look into replacing it, but had been hesitant because of the comments above and because the newest models do not have SNMP enabled. With this additional news, it's unlikely I'll stick with Apple for my router. I'm not sure what I will stick with them for in the future.

 

[thekeyring]

So, in a couple more years, Apple will be nothing more than tablets and phones? Timmy needs to hit the road.

Tim Cook cuts down products and your reaction is this? When he introduced new products people here said "There are too many! It's worse than before Steve came back!"

Literally anything Apple does is Tim Cook's decision and bad news for Apple, right?

 

[zorinlynx]

iCloud is the alternative to Time Capsule and I have a feeling its adoption has far exceeded the purchases of Time Capsules. But I am definitely sad about Airport Express being discontinued.

iCloud doesn't scale well. For dealing with a few gigs of data it's fine, but if you're dealing with hundreds of GB of files you really need to store and back it up locally. For one thing, most people don't have enough bandwidth, especially upstream, to back EVERYTHING up to iCloud.

Also there are trust issues. Your data isn't truly safe unless you have at LEAST two backups that you control.

 

[JRobinsonJr]

Maybe they are dismantling the team to focus their energies on a Amazon Echo competitor with similar functionality and capabilities.

We can only hope they are working on that, but why dismantle the AirPort team? Apple has $Billions$ to invest. Seems to me that the  leadership is acting like a small company on a financial budget. WTF?

 

[jonnysods]

Those buggers. I want a new time capsule!!

 

[Rob_2811]

Electric vehicles, streaming video and music are a given (it's like saying DVD's are the future in 1997) Duh.

I'd argue their hardware -> SoCs, Touch-ID, Apple Pay, force touch, computation camera (7 plus) are thing they implement well (under Tim Cook). It's the services and software that's rough around the edges.

Yes they are and Cooks Apple has bungled pretty much all of them, Apple Music will be ok long term the other two, well it remains to be seen but the early indications aren't good.

Force touch is pretty pointless at the moment, there certainly isn't much point in it on the Mac, the phone is different but only because they redesigned the OS with iOS 10 so people have to use it. Otherwise I think a lot of people wouldn't bother.

The computational camera is very early days i'll reserve judgment as to whether it has been done well

SoC's and Touch ID were well in place before Jobs died, all he has done there is keep the ship steady, that is Cook all over though. He has kept the money rolling in mainly with iteration on the iPhone which was well an truly the focal point of the roadmap before Jobs went but where do they go now? Almost every new major product or service introduced under Cook has received a distinctly lukewarm reception.

This was a man who was telling the world that tablets would overtake computers by 2015, I wouldn't trust his judgement on the direction of future technologies whatsoever.

 

[Mildredop]

I stopped buying the AirPort when I realised you could get wifi routers with the modem built-in. Much less clutter and the signal on my TP-Link is a lot better than my Extreme.

 

[PatriotInvasion]

Too bad. The Time Capsule was a great product. It's been nice knowing my entire Mac is backed up every hour without worry. But, this product was developed in a pre-iCloud era, and I can see a time soon when you can backup an entire Mac to iCloud and restore from backup just like an iOS device.

Yes, this would pad their services revenue, but offsite backup is much safer for your previous memories and documents. If you require local backups, you can buy an external drive or NAS device.

Hopefully this product contraction allows them to keep their primary products updated more frequently.

 

[magbarn]

Wow Apple, let's solder in SSDs in our latest Pro computer and then kill your easiest backup plan in MacOS. WTG!!
Cook needs to be given the boot so he can go buy a NFL/NBA/MLB team....

Tim Cook=Steve Ballmer=John Sculley

 

[djcerla]

Never owned one, but I'm pretty much well connected and backed up.

If it was for the MR crew, Apple would still be making the Laserwriter.

 

[MacOG728893]

Had a previous generation extreme die. Switched over to an Asus high end unit and have been pretty happy. Of course, it is not apple, but those of you looking, I highly recommend Asus routers. Say what you want about their firmware, but the GUI has been made my favorite among the competion.

This news does nothing for me, but this is only my opinion.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

As a corporation, it can be sued by shareholders if it does something that doesn't maximise profit. Capitalism, babe.

That is an overstatement. The legal standard is gross negligence, not just that the company's executives or BOD made a bad decision. So, here, if Apple wanted to continue developing Airport, even at a loss, it could on the basis of supporting the Mac or Apple brand. Companies have all sorts of loss leaders to support other endeavors that are profitable. For an example check out a grocery store weekly sale flier.

I'm thinking you just like to bash capitalism. Would it be better for executives to support failed or obsolete products, just because? I'm not suggesting Airport is either of these, just that executives do have to make decisions on products, divisions, whatever, that don't play a role in the company's goals. And that is not a bad thing in and of itself as you would suggest by your blanket statement on capitalism. These products wouldn't exist in the first place if there was no venue for profit in the first place. That is capitalism -- creator of things we need, don't need but want anyway.