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I have three Extremes in one home, and a Time Capsule in another. Until the day arrives that they either all depart, or new technology just simply makes them unusable, then I will move to another brand. For the moment, because of the layout of one of my homes, the three Extremes do an awesome job, CAT6 wired all the way through.

Even if the Time Capsule's HDD goes, the first thing likely to happen, the router part should still be perfectly OK.

Bottom line: nothing is broken so far, just leave it alone to do its job.


Not necessarily true. As the article explained they’re going to stop support in five years. You’ll need the firmware/security updates to make them safe. Plus, at least another generation of new WiFi standards will surely be out by then.
 
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Just imagine if Timmy Boy decides to resurrect discontinued lines...

Airport SE- $249
Airport Pro- $329
Time Capsule Pro 2TB- $499 4TB- $599

And what about Monitors?

Cinema Display SE Unapologetically Plastic 21 Inch- $699
Cinema Display Pro
21 Inch- $1099
27 Inch- $1999
32 Inch- $2999
 
So what do people recommend (that isn't Google WiFi)?



Edit: People have so far suggested....

  • Eero
  • NETGEAR Nighthawk
  • NETGEAR Orbi
  • Asus RT-AC68U
  • Luma
  • AmpliFi HD
  • Ubiquiti UniFi

I had a time capsule some time ago and back then it was flawless.
Recently switched to the Orbi and LOVE it. Great deal on the two piece set at Costco right now too.

Also, had a nighthawk and returned it. After one week, needed to be reset every 24-48 hours.
 
ASUS RT-AC5300. By far the best router I have ever owned. No issues at all. iTunes and Time Machine compatible. Coupled with a Synology NAS, it can do things Apple's Time Capsule could only dream of.


This is essentially why I’ve been steadily leaving the iOS ecosystem.
 
Yep.. You just know this is gonna end baddly..

Particularly when not many third party router manufactures implement Bonjour fully... I was unable to use WOL over Back-to-my-Mac to wake my Mac-mini from over at friends place.
I think the real issue when trying to use WoL over Back to my Mac (since on LAN it doesn't even go through the router) is if routers somehow screw with IPSec connections... which they often do. My stupid router was messing up my VPN that way until I ditched it for an AEBS. I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the routers don't have to do anything special for Bonjour.
 
well maybe they could just end their hardware and just sell the OS. less overhead. I remember the days when they said they were a hardware company first. That meant networking too. Now they are crippling hardware and avoiding the user ability to choose unless apple does it themselves. Every single one of these iMacs could have been designed better and more affordable/adaptable but because of wall street they consider the bottom line to be overpriced non upgradable units driven by lawyers and patents. Pro line needs to be more user and industry friendly. The iMac pro is garbage and that for me is saying a lot. I have used macs exclusively since the 80s. Sure I would use it but I could never afford it ever. Same as the pro trashcan. It had potential but it became a cube. People want modular upgradability and compatibility. We don't want to be forced into everything being an iPad.
 
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Apple should buy EERO.

They are the only independent mesh network manufacturer right now. The rest are products of bigger companies. Some modifications to the privacy and account management features of Eero would make it Apple-esque.

And on top of it, they are great. I have been recommending them exclusively for about 15 months now, and other than one out-of-the-box failure, they have been great and reliable.

Since they are doing so well, I would rather not see Apple buy them. The development might suffer under Apple's current level of productivity when it comes to hardware that isn't a phone.
 
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The problem is the less sticky the ecosystem becomes, the less likely someone is to buy an iPhone. I have iOS\iPhone because it ties in so nicely with everything else Apple I own. The less of a tie I have to the ecosystem, the easier it would be to stray in the future purchases of phones.


Say it louder. They can’t hear you in Cupertino.
 
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Sometime in the winter of 2016 (November 21 was the MacRumors article), Apple announced it was getting out of the Airport market. I bought an Airport Extreme at the end of November 2016. The next month the local electric utility cut power somewhere, knocking out my active equipment. When it came on again, the 8-year-old Airport Extreme would not connect. I simply set up the new Airport Extreme and have been using it ever since. (Lucky buy? Foresight? Have not won any lottery, however.)
 
I could not say enough good things about my Ubiquiti UniFi setup. It has been rock solid but might be overkill for a lot of people.
I have one too and like it, but it definitely would've been too difficult for, say, my parents to set up. And there's no AirPlay or Time Machine.
 
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Not the right decision, it’s a very poor one.
The right decision would be to refresh it, not give up on it. Turning it into a single, adaptable product would have been good. Apple don’t update a product then say ‘look, it’s not making us as much money, let’s get rid of it’. Often the market itself may be getting smaller, however it is also changing in terms of features and price. You’d have thought this would be obvious to certain people within Apple. I am not saying to refresh the current lineup, but instead create a single, adaptable product that meets all of these needs or clean up the lineup to 2 products.
 
My 2TB Time Capsule got destroyed by a power spike during a storm in 2014 only 6 mos after buying it. Replaced with a TP-Link and 3TB ext hard drive for less and faster all around. It was a cool package though but one of the selling points to use as a Time Machine backup was kinda bunk since backing up such big data over wifi just doesn't make sense. The replacement has been flawless ever since.

Looking forward to another upgrade in a year once 'ax' and docsis 3.2 mature in the market.
What's wrong with backups over wifi? You do one slow one, then the rest are easy 10-100MB. In fact, I used to Time Machine back up over the Internet (via a VPN) after doing the initial backup on-site.
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My understanding is TM doesn't work reliably on every third party router though I haven't personally verified this. I can verify the Bonjour service doesn't function correctly on the Velop causing a connection drop every hour with a client which hosts an iTunes Home Sharing library once the HDD sleeps. No work around that actually works so far and none in sight from Linksys. I'm monitoring their site for a possible fix as they are aware.
Yep, it's a mess. Crappy routers mess with things at layers they shouldn't be touching, and this happens. Time Machine is also super picky with network backups, requiring certain protocols for some reason, and I've even verified and reported a bug with backups over 490GiB.
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Lame but let's be honest. Apple is the iPhone company. Not the computer company of yesteryear. What product besides the iPhone do they give any attention to whatsoever? Their OSes are full of bugs (even the iOS one sadly). Their Macs are randomly updated (Mac Pro every 5 years it seems, MacMini even less). iPods are dead. Most accessories are either dead (Airport) or vapourware (Airpower) and even the iPads have become mostly afterthoughts.
Not sure how focusing only on one thing properly will benefit them in the long run.
iOS 11 was such an unbelievable disaster. They did a better job when they weren't 99% focusing on it. To be fair, I think they're doing OK with the Macs. Hardware has been annoying, but macOS is staying ahead of the competition.
 
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This would have really bummed me out—however, the Linksys Velop system is so outstanding it completely eliminates the need for Apple to develop an in-house solution. When third party companies out-Apple Apple, there's no need for Apple to remain in the space.

Not everyone wants to splurge and spend $500 on a Linksys Velop 3-pack mesh system.
 
Can two Airport Extremes work within one house? i.e. one upstairs and one in a basement that has signal loss? Can or do they play nice together?
I already have one Airport Extreme and love it. Would get another if they can coexist.
Yeah. If one is your router, the second is just an ethernet-wifi bridge, and the utility walks you through that when you connect the second. Handoff between wireless networks is hit or miss, especially on mobile devices, but that's because of the wifi standard itself not supporting it.

With other router/wifi combos, multiple access points are usually a nightmare to configure, btw. So bad that you have to instead buy something that's marketed only as an "extender" just so it does that by default.
 
You’re obviously not old enough to remember Apple’s resurgence. The iPod followed by a coherent introduction of Apple devices created the ecosystem that customers love and rely on today. Timmy and friends seem to be dismantling the ecosystem one pillar at a time.

I am old to enough to have seen the resurgence, and airports, extremes and time capsules were never very popular. General public agreed that they were overpriced Apple branded products that did the same thing as products 1/2 the price.
Think back to time capsule reviews for example - they rarely exceeded 3/5 stars and even among us Apple people, took too long to come with a HDD large enough to suit our needs.
Airports were better, but once the extreme came along, airport (sans “extreme”) quality went out the window.
I’m not knocking the products - I absolutely loved my TC, but these products, realistically, probably moved like the HomePod is “moving” today.
Unless Apple calls such a slow-moving product a “hobby,” (which under Cook, they just simply don’t have time for such fun any longer), it willn’t be around for long.
 
My Airport Express is connected to my old amplifier and I stream with iTunes my ALAC files. Hope it is going to last 10/15/20 years more. My good old Sansui AU5500 is from 1975, why not wish for this?
I've murdered a few Airport Expresses somehow. Not sure if it was power surges or packet storms on my LAN (I accidentally had a loop in a tangle of 100 ethernet connections). Now I'm extra sad that they're gone.
 
Probably a mesh router. They work better over a wider range. Apple sells a third party one in its stores now.
How is Airport not mesh? Maybe I misunderstand, but mesh is just the old (i.e. 2001) capability of having multiple wifi bridges to LAN, so why are people acting like that's new tech? They're especially designed for that. Plug more in, and it asks you to join them.
 
They kill this, one of their better products, but continue to sell hot garbage like Mac Mini, Homepod, Watch and the outdated, overpriced and unupgradeable Mac Pro?
Why do you refer to the desktop Mac Mini as hot garbage, and you don't like the Mac Pro? I'm still using my 2008 Mac Pro, and if they could sell me a new Mac Pro soon enough, I would buy one of the new ones, providing the price isn't as high as some people think.
 
This company loves destroying everything that got them to the top.

Yes. Absolutely this. They just want to focus on the iPhone.
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Do people seriously believe AirPort “got [Apple] to the top”?

No, it was a fantastic solution for those who did not want to meddle with any settings and wanted a decent, functional piece of hardware. I have recently tried to get myself on an Asus AC51 router, but it only got me to love the airport express even more.
 
I bought myself an AirPort Extreme after reading articles praising its range and reliability. Connectivity went from reaching most of the house, to not being able to get half way. My daughter couldn't connect at all upstairs on her MacBook. Went back to the Virgin supplied router and normality returned. It then sat in a box in a cupboard for a year till I sold it.
Bought myself a 2TB Time Capsule and faithfully backed up to it. I only needed to restore from it once and it took most of the day to restore what it took a couple of hours to back up. I realised that for my needs the 2.75TB of disk space in the file server, coupled with iCloud, was perfectly adequate (it being a home set up rather than a business one). It's much quicker to wipe and reinstall macOS and reinstall software from the App Store than to do a TC restore.
But to scrap the range does seem an odd decision in the light of the seeming increasing use of Macs in the business world, unless Apple have some sort of Enterprise iCloud package up their sleeves.
 
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