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I was really hoping that they were just waiting until the next WiFi standard to come out to release new AirPort base stations. I'm sad that they're being discontinued.

However, I do wonder: What will they recommend to replace the Time Capsule for networked backup purposes? We can still do Time Machine backups to local USB drives, but retiring the Time Capsule leaves a big hole for this application.

Probably other routers with a network drive attached. They’ll probably recommend some just like the did when they discontinued their cinema displays and promoted LG.
 
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Hyperbole much? If this was a massive seller then it wouldn’t have been cut, just like their $1000 monitors. What got them to the top were music players, and then phones which incorporated those music players. Everything else was limited in scope and adoption even among Apple users. I doubt that 1% of iPhone users in any single recent quarter purchased an Airport device in the past 3-5 years.

They weren’t selling that well because they’re from 2013 and people can buy newer triple band routers for the same or less.
 
Noooooo!

I know, I know, it was coming. But they're just such reliable routers that work with everything. I really hate the idea that I'm going to have to find something else the next time I buy. The last time I tried a top-of-the-line Linksys router, half my HomeKit devices wouldn't work or would drop connection within a day.
 
If I buy one and connect my MBP and Mac Pro to it with ethernet cables will I see 1000Mbps data transfers between them? I am doing quite a lot of video transcoding with Compressor and it can tap the whole network's processing power so obviously my current rooter's 100mbps data transfer is the bottleneck in the whole pipeline.
 
Their software doesn’t have all of the options and settings that other routers do, but they were rock solid. They did their job and they did it well. Nearly every other router I’ve had would drop the connection. This has never happened so far with my 2TB 5th gen TC.
 
It's a bit rubbish but it's hard to compete with the prevalence of free routers that ISPs routinely supply now. Although they're nowhere near the quality of an airport, they are, for the most part reliable enough for most people. Thus third party routers have become even more of a niche product.

At least Apple will still be issuing security updates for the time being but I'd much rather they carried on selling the product.
 
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Do people seriously believe AirPort “got [Apple] to the top”?
No - but what got Apple to the top once was the eco-system. If I purchased a MacBook Pro in 2012 I could get a MacBook Pro with Magsafe (I could see if my battery was charging or not + magnet for safety), I could charge my iPhone with the USB ports, I could buy an Apple Display to hook up with my MacBook Pro and also buy a AirPort Extreme to get my network set up in literally 10 minutes. That took Apple to the top.

We don't have that anymore, any of it actually.
 
However the market has matured and it isn’t a core business. That said, Time Capsule integration was nice (though sometimes better in theory than in practice).

Depends, of course if you define the core business as selling iPhones (money maker), then you are right. That is the way Cook thinks. If you define the core business as selling an integrated infrastructure that is easy to set up and use for a wide verity of users then WiFi devices were a part of the core business.

The WiFi from ISP devices are really bad, and now Apple is at their mercy. At the same time these ISPs are increasing becoming competitors with Apple as Apple moves into content creation.
 
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.
 
However, I do wonder: What will they recommend to replace the Time Capsule for networked backup purposes? We can still do Time Machine backups to local USB drives, but retiring the Time Capsule leaves a big hole for this application.

This is a good point. They don’t support Time Machine using external hard drives attached to non-Apple routers. It would be nice if they added this to the next version of macOS but I doubt it will happen. It’s possible to set this up in what’s left of macOS Server but that requires a dedicated Mac.
 
No - but what got Apple to the top once was the eco-system. If I purchased a MacBook Pro in 2012 I could get a MacBook Pro with Magsafe (I could see if my battery was charging or not + magnet for safety), I could charge my iPhone with the USB ports, I could buy an Apple Display to hook up with my MacBook Pro and also buy a AirPort Extreme to get my network set up in literally 10 minutes. That took Apple to the top.

We don't have that anymore, any of it actually.
aalp-201803-seasonal-colors.jpeg

You sure there’s no ecosystem anymore? Or that the ecosystem didn’t move to things they could actually sell?
 
Depends, of course if you define the core business as selling iPhones (money maker), then you are right. That is the way Cook thinks. If you define the core business as selling an integrated infrastructure that is easy to set up and use for a wide verity of users then WiFi devices were a part of the core business.

The WiFi from ISP devices are really bad, and now Apple is at their mercy. At the same time these ISPs are increasing becoming competitors with Apple as Apple moves into content creation.

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.
 
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