Apple 'Not' Working on New AirPort, But Apple TV and HomePod Provide Glimmer of Hope

[mcnallym]

In terms of time capsule then can either,

A) simply attach an external storage and will ask if want to use for Time Capsule.
B) every NAS vendor out there offers a Time Capsule compatible backup app.

Pretty much every home router works well with Apple now that isn’t some Chinese oem that never heard of and Time Capsule is also pretty much nailed with NAS.

Ubiquiti works very well with Apple and has the whole network part down so no real need for Apple to provide products there now.
Certainly wouldn’t be able to charge the premium that Apple wants to provide and the only premium is early days of new Wi-Fi standard and would Apple want to invest the money for what not that many people willl buy.

Once you move out of tech enthusiasts then how many people don’t just use the ISP router provided.

 

[strayts]

What routers are considered the best nowadays? I have an Asus that has been decent, but I’d prefer good or great to decent.

Anything made by Ubiquiti. I run two Unifi Expresses in my home and it's fantastic.

 

[strayts]

Apple basically already makes networking hardware. It's called Ubiquiti Unifi. The team that made the original Apple Airports. They broke off and started their own company. It's as Apple as it gets, but frankly, even better. At this point, Apple could make a novelty Wifi access point, what this article describes, but a fully fledged ecosystem is already built in the most Apple-esque style possible, Unifi.

I cannot recommend it enough. It took my HomeKit setup from a nightmare to flawless, and I have 250+ devices, 200+ automations, etc. It runs perfectly with Unifi.

Couldn't agree more. It's that good.

 

[maximit]

The private DFS channel hack sound like a plan! How hard is that to setup?

Basically something i stubbled upon when messing around with AirPort and another router with Fresh Tomato on it. You need a second router with DD-wrt or Fresh Tomato firmware so you can set a DFS channel manually as thats usually not allowed on stock firmware. If you set the AirPort 5G channel to Auto and it will do a scan for conflicts and not find any like weather radar etc, it will default to DFS channel 132 always. But if you have another router right beside it on a different DFS channel like 52 or 100 it will pick that same channel. It does get reset after reboot, so it only lasts as long as the uptime.

 

[JForestZ34]

I had an airport!! Best router I’ve had!


James

 

[benwiggy]

I bought an Airport Time Capsule recently on eBay. Replaced the drive with a Seagate IronWolf 4TB, and it's now backing up the house laptops beautifully.

If you want wireless backups for laptops, it's either this; or a Synology NAS; or sharing a TM drive from a Mini.

It's a shame you can't backup iPhones and iPads this way.

 

[coolfactor]

Having all Apple devices of all types seamlessly forming a mesh network would be awesome. Why can't my phone just piggyback off of my laptop when they are right next to each other and the laptop has a super-fast connection sitting idle?

 

[coolfactor]

I could care less, had a time capsule that needed rebooting at least weekly. Besides, a lot of people in the US get a WiFi router from their internet provider. And IF Apple will release one in the future, folks here will call them out for price gouging …

Internet providers, at least in the past, were notorious for proving substandard, untrustworthy, unsupported WiFi routers. They gotta keep their costs down somehow. I think it's improved lately as newer versions of the WiFi protocol have become a selling point for them.

 

[FasterQuieter]

I have to say my old AirPort Express and AirPort Extreme were no more reliable than the Verizon box I have now. I made no use of Time Machine backup through the device or whatever other ecosystem benefits it offered. Just to say, I don't care at all if they make a new one or not.

 

[Olde Dave]

The Apple Time Capsule is the only Apple product I’ve ever bought that didn’t work for me. I got one and could not get it to function correctly for backups or even maintain a stable internet connection. After exchanging it for a new one and having the same problems, I just gave up.

I’m glad no other product I’ve bought from Apple has had the same lackluster experience.

 

[Westside guy]

While I prefer Apple gear, I'm not a huge fanboi... except when it comes to their Airport routers. Those were markedly superior to the competition (heck, I'm still rocking the last-gen Extreme).

It's funny how, back then, so many people complained about the high price... yet now they don't bat an eye at mesh routers that cost 2x, 3x, 4x what Apple charged for the Extreme.

 

[ignatius345]

I had a couple AirPorts (full size and Express) and they were great and very easy to administer. I kept the Express around for quite a while as a way to add AirPlay to some powered bookshelf speakers, while I had an Apple TV unit handling AirPlay to my living room stereo receiver. It all worked quite well for how many parts were cobbled together. At one point I tried hooking a hard drive up to my AirPort Extreme and doing backups that way, but could never quite get it to work reliably and just gave up on it.

I've drunk the Kool Aid since then and am now using HomePods for everything (two minis in separate rooms, and two full-sized ones in the living room in a stereo pair, which also handle TV sound). Siri is dumb as a bag of rocks, but music playback is largely quite good -- though I think Apple could be doing a lot more there. It's still too many taps to manage what's playing on the HomePods from my phone, and I can't manage anything from my Mac, which seems stupid.

 

[jaw04005]

Certainly wouldn’t be able to charge the premium that Apple wants to provide and the only premium is early days of new Wi-Fi standard and would Apple want to invest the money for what not that many people willl buy.

Once you move out of tech enthusiasts then how many people don’t just use the ISP router provided.

Meh. It works for eero. Apple can play in this market if they so choose. They created the home WiFi router market with AirPort Base Station 1.0.

An Apple router that is privacy and security focused, natively supports iCloud Private Relay, serves as a next gen HomeKit bridge (maybe it has Zigbee and Thread, supports third-party HomeKit devices), maybe even has built-in Apple TV would sell enough to keep the division in the positive and could even be the key to an Apple Home strategy—cameras and doorbell record directly to hub, hub uses AI to decide which clips to upload to iCloud, etc.

I have a UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra. It's great, but these aren't for home users. You could make the same argument about Apple TV and set top boxes, over-the-ear headphones or any of the other markets Apple chooses to play in, but doesn't sell hundreds of millions of units.

Sometimes it's about ecosystem, not unit sales.

 

[Think|Different]

It's not happening, it's never happening again. I was in unique position within AppleCare to know, when they exited this business, that it was broadly because support for router devices is astronomically hard given the amount of variables – placement, ISP, people's unique homes, city vs country, the list goes on and on. They were (and are for the players in the space) a support nightmare and are NOT in Apple's best interest, perception wise, to bring them back to market when it's even MORE complicated now than when they exited the category. Of COURSE, they could...But they will not.

 

[ipedro]

Leading up to the discontinuation of Airport, Apple had been decentralizing the home network. AirPrint standardization removed the need to network a printer, AirDrop replaced the need to network devices to one another to transfer files. AirPlay allowed you to play content on other devices by-passing the need to network. iCloud made all your files available to all your devices, not just in your home but anywhere.

Meanwhile, Apple has been building a Thread radio into every device (still turned off in Macs and iPads but the chip is there) to tie it all together.

A router was never designed to take the kind of network traffic that dozens of cheap internet connected devices created. We've all experienced it, whether ourselves or being the go to person in our family to trouble shoot people's network setups. A peer to peer mesh network works better with Thread connecting devices to one another in a self healing network. The router just needs to be a dumb internet access point, and just one of what could be many with 5G devices connecting to the internet themselves. And that's where Apple building its own 5G chips comes in: it'll be in everything from a Watch to a Mac.


Some previous reading:

October 2020:

I’ve been saying since Apple discontinued Airport that Apple was heading towards a future where a WiFi router based home network was irrelevant.

Today, Apple implemented two of those necessary pieces. Thread networks devices without the need for a central “home network” and 5G provides speed and bandwidth not only matching that of a WiFi network but exceeding it.

The future of home networks is no home networks. Every device just talks to each other directly and where feasible and necessary, devices connect to the internet via their own embedded 5G chip.

June 2019:

If we look closely at Apple's hardware releases in the last several years, it's possible to interpret their strategy and understand why Apple got out of the router game.

The answer is that each Apple device is its own piece of a mesh network. Every Apple device recognizes Apple devices around it and seamlessly creates a network of all devices logged into the same Apple ID and known Apple ID's.

The reliability of transferring files via AirDrop has gotten to a point where it really does just work. iCloud puts storage in the cloud where any device can access it, even outside of a traditional local network. Printers connect directly to each device, without having to configure them manually. These functions constitute the majority of uses for a home network.

The obvious piece that's missing is of course internet access. iPhones connect to the internet directly via LTE and can even get other devices online like Macs and iPads. But LTE data is expensive and Macs and AppleTVs consume large amounts of data. This is where 5G will come in. Speeds are expected to exceed terrestrial internet and available bandwidth will enable ISP's to charge the same for wireless data as they do for traditional internet — with the added benefit that it's much cheaper to deploy 5G infrastructure than it is optical cabling under city streets and on poles.

Some people will probably say that this isn't viable for offices. Commercial networks were never AirPort's focus. IT departments didn't buy a bunch of AirPort to build networks. It was always primarily a consumer device. We have to see this from a consumer perspective and so for consumers, a direct internet connection via a 5G chip built into each device makes far more sense than configuring WiFi networks at home.

Mesh networks are experiencing a bit of a moment now but I don't think that will last as 5G is deployed and people start relying on their future iPhone's 5G connection when data prices drop to the price of traditional home internet prices. Apple wasn't looking at the short term when they decided to abandon AirPort. They're thinking ahead. I fully expect Macs and even AppleTV's to come with built in 5G chips in the coming years and for Watches and iPads to come with cellular chips standard.

 

[robinp]

What routers are considered the best nowadays? I have an Asus that has been decent, but I’d prefer good or great to decent.

I have a Unifi dream machine pro. By far the most reliable router I’ve ever had.

It’s not cheap, but if you want WiFi 7, their access points are great value. The whole package of router + access points is cheaper than many WiFi 7 mesh router packs and way better.

 

[Konrad]

I’ve read about Ubiquiti when looking for a new solution to improve a Los Angeles home location. However having the exact same (identical) set-ups in CA and in my house in Europe, I abandoned the idea as it is clearly not the AirPort Extreme router and the multiple AirPort Express mesh, but the disastrous lack of signal quality in the US. It would be great to get a new router from the Apple ecosystem, where looking at alternative current products on the market (US), it’s not exactly inexpensive, so the profits are there. Apple could simply buy Ubiquiti by the end of the week. Or perhaps Apple does not want to be blamed for effective poor product performance caused by low quality from U.S. broadband providers?

 

[jz0309]

Internet providers, at least in the past, were notorious for proving substandard, untrustworthy, unsupported WiFi routers. They gotta keep their costs down somehow. I think it's improved lately as newer versions of the WiFi protocol have become a selling point for them.

I moved a few months ago, have Frontier (soon Verizon again) FIOS and got an eero 6e router with it, changed some settings but have to say it’s been rock solid and I would not spend money to replace it

 

[JEY]

I'm all for an Apple airport, but the fees for extra bags would be through the roof (yes they'd control the airlines too).

 

[John_Blackthorne]

I still have the airports - can’t even sell on Facebook marketplace for $19 lol 😆

I'd buy one. They are all so old by now, the drives are dead. I bought one off eBay and got like 1 backup out of it before it croaked.

And man was it slow!

 

[John_Blackthorne]

Seems really far off. Not expecting to see another Airport in the near future. Will take at least another 3 to 4 years for all Apple products to have in house WiFi chips. Maybe 2 to 3 years after the transition is completed, we might see some benefits.

I want to see a new TimeCapsule. What is Apple's solution to desktop backup in 2025? Gobs of iCloud storage (no thanks!)?

 

[John_Blackthorne]

A HomePod that connects directly to a broadband modem and functions as a wireless router would slap.

Need it to run time machine backups. I have no wireless solution and am too simple for a NAS.

 

[MacDownunder]

Apple basically already makes networking hardware. It's called Ubiquiti Unifi. The team that made the original Apple Airports. They broke off and started their own company. It's as Apple as it gets, but frankly, even better. At this point, Apple could make a novelty Wifi access point, what this article describes, but a fully fledged ecosystem is already built in the most Apple-esque style possible, Unifi.

I cannot recommend it enough. It took my HomeKit setup from a nightmare to flawless, and I have 250+ devices, 200+ automations, etc. It runs perfectly with Unifi.

With respect Apple dont make Ubiquiti HW - this is a totally seperate company that do have ex Apple employees but also many others from other backgrounds and companies too.
Unify also requires a learning curve and its not plug and play like many people want - the interface whilst powerful is very daunting for many (and not too different to the Omada UI which I now use which has been rock solid for me too).
I actually had issues with my USG-Pro constantly crashing no matter what I did - I tried a Nuctura fan update (mainly to shut the thing up - wow they are noisy in a home environment) along with custom air routing to cool the CPU which didnt help.
I also think the temps that the USG (non pro version) and the cloud keys run at is unacceptable for any long term reliability - if you dont believe me put your hand on one or either when they've been on for a while - its worse when they are doing a bit of work.
If you like to tinker and prepared to learn a bit the edge routers are actually probably better as get same or better HW for a smaller spend - no pretty UI though.
Sorry for long post/reply, I am happy yours runs well, and I really wanted mine to work too - but it didnt in my use case

 

[Harmonious Zen]

Please make routers again! Time Capsule was incredible, and made backups for regular people’s Macs so easy. And this could also push HomeKit into more homes, giving more Apple users a Thread/Matter hub.

If it just works, I’d be all in on an Apple router. With all the talk these days about security threats from foreign governments, it’d be nice to have an Apple solution.

 

[MacDownunder]

I bought an Airport Time Capsule recently on eBay. Replaced the drive with a Seagate IronWolf 4TB, and it's now backing up the house laptops beautifully.

If you want wireless backups for laptops, it's either this; or a Synology NAS; or sharing a TM drive from a Mini.

It's a shame you can't backup iPhones and iPads this way.

There are other NAS solutions that can do this too
I have QNAP 6 Bay doing exactly this, dad has a WD MyCLoud Home Duo also doing same.
These are just a few options of many, including home brew versions