Apple Releases Redesigned iOS-Like Airport Utility 6.0 and an Airport Base Station Bug-Fix

[MacinDoc]

My canon MX 870 printer doesn't get detected after the airport upgrade. Anyone else facing the same issue?

From my experience, the MX 870's wireless drivers do not play nicely with Lion, period.

 

[Macman45]

From my experience, the MX 870's wireless drivers do not play nicely with Lion, period.

No issues with my Epson SX 525WD....Still sitting on the network as it should.

 

[Icaras]

From my experience, the MX 870's wireless drivers do not play nicely with Lion, period.

I have the MX860 and I was able to wirelessly scan things right after Airport firmware upgrade. Nothing screwed up for me, luckily.

 

[Winni]

Apple just keeps coming up with reasons not to buy another Mac.

You can still put Linux on Apple hardware. As long as that is still possible, it's simply a question of whether you like their hardware or not.

 

[FrankHahn]

Is configuring Airport base stations using the classic app difficult? Whenever you have a new Airport device, on a Mac, the classic Utility will automatically detects it and guides you through it step by step in an easy question-based wizard. Nothing more simpler than that. Preventing user to access information, on the other hand, is not useful. A router must be able to list the devices that connect to it. The 6.0 app will not show devices connected to it via ethernet. That's like taking out your cars' speedometer to make it "simpler," but clearly not useful.

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What's obviously missing is a list of devices connected via ethernet. This is a fundamental basic function for a router. If the 6.0 app had this, I wouldn't even bother with 5.6 as I kinda like the network map layout of 6.0.

Clicking on the Time Capsule, I see immediately all the wireless clients connected to the Time Capsule.

 

[Winni]

I'm an IT/network nerd with a pfSense box, Cisco GigE switch and a house wired for it all...

...and I own an AirPort Extreme.

There aren't a whole lot of simultaneous dual-band routers out there with a Gigabit WAN uplink. Those that do cost just as much as the AirPort Extreme. Granted, my APX is in bridged mode with pfSense doing all the heavy lifting, but I bought it to compliment the professional-grade equipment in my house. Buying a Cisco access point with the same features as the APX would have been easily 3x the price.

When it comes to wireless solutions, Mikrotik is the king of the hill - Cisco missed the wireless and even the firewall train years ago. I use Mikrotik and Cisco products at work every day, but we have a clear role separation in place: We use Cisco for switches and (backbone and access) routers, Mikrotik routers are being used for wireless access points and firewalls.

That being said, the best wireless HOME solution that I ever found is a TPLink router with dd-wrt on it. It costs around 45 Euros and is the most robust wireless router that I ever had in my house.

 

[macnerd93]

I just keep wondering about how little Snow Leopard has received love from Apple lately. It might be just me, but didn't Apple use to support their second-latest OS far better than they do now? Not everyone wants to move to Lion.

nope only security updates thats about it, as far as Apple is concerned Snow Leopard is now obsolete

 

[mmomega]

Zero problems updating
Zero problems with WiFi at all. Lion doesn't drop any signals here.
Heart-rate did not elevate.
Tears were not shed.

Overall a decent day, new shineys to check out and Hey... everything I had still works the same as yesterday.

Bye-Bye 6 speed manual, Hello flappy paddle automatic.

 

[pika2000]

Clicking on the Time Capsule, I see immediately all the wireless clients connected to the Time Capsule.

Not my point. Read again:

What's obviously missing is a list of devices connected via ethernet

 

[Macman45]

Zero problems updating
Zero problems with WiFi at all. Lion doesn't drop any signals here.
Heart-rate did not elevate.
Tears were not shed.

Overall a decent day, new shineys to check out and Hey... everything I had still works the same as yesterday.

Bye-Bye 6 speed manual, Hello flappy paddle automatic.

Nice to see a positive thread....No issues here either...Flappy paddle gearbox? Hmm, it looks nice, but It's not a Ferrari yet

 

[Can't Stop]

Very funny. Sadly, also very true.

Very funny indeed, but the sad part is that it looks a lot like schizophrenia. You know when people see things that actually aren't there.

 

[Smultie]

Anybody here got the Airport Disk <-> iCloud thingy to work?
I signed in with my iCloud account on the Airport Extreme, but now what?

 

[0134168]

Version 6

It seems to me that it´s an experiment of new GUI. Probably they will add all the features of the 5.6 later.

 

[NutsNGum]

You may go sarcastic about it .. but too bad, it's true. More than 70% of Apple's revenue comes from iOS now. So, yes .. Apple dumbing things down to iOS level.

Starting with Airport Extreme firmware, anything from Apple ... super extra hyper simplified, from now on

Oh no! There is nothing I despise more than ease of use and accessibility.

 

[Macsterguy]

Last week, we needed to buy a new router for our office. It was a toss-up between an Airport Extreme and a high-end ASUS router ($60 cheaper). We ended up getting the ASUS because the store offered a return policy on it, but not on Apple products. I was going to remain open-minded about this non-Apple device.

I opened the box, it was very slickly-designed. Then I hooked it up and connected to it wirelessly from my Mac. What happened next blew my mind... a window popped up which looked like a very simple web browser. No icon in the Dock or anything, but just this simple Wizard window. I walked through a couple of steps configuring the router and was done. This beat Airport Utility hands-down in terms of being simple and straightforward. Now, I'm sure I'd need to go into the browser and access that manually next time, but I was impressed by the elegance.

There is a new WPA-2 exploit out now and ALL NEW 80211N ROUTERS (ALL MAKES) ARE VULNERABLE TO EXCEPT APPLE'S NEW ROUTERS - google it

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Try using 5.6. 6.0 is the "easy-to-use" version with less functionality. It sounds like they are keeping 5.6 around for those who need the original functionality.

Also, you can configure printers connected to an Airport from System Preference>Print and Scan

Just hook the printer up and use 6.0. It just works...

 

[CBlakeston]

Sweet!

All good here. I don't know what the update changed but I've gone from 500k downloads to 750k. It also seems to have fixed the 'airdisk has been disconnected message' I would see when waking from sleep that was introduced with 10.7.2.

It was only a message mind, I just clicked ignore and everything was still mounted and working as it should. Still, nice to not see it and have a speed increase of 50% :-D

 

[MythicFrost]

I saw "Apple Releases Redesigned..." and got all excited, only to be disappointed by... this.

On topic: I like the new look of it.

 

[generator]

Did they add the possibility to send WOL packages from over the internet?

 

[00sterb33k]

Disappointed

Very disappointed by this update. Looks nice, but many options have disappeared. I miss the "Allow this network to be extended" option the mot; it is crucial for my network setup! Restoring the older Airport Utility via Time Capsule is not allowed, unfortunately... Not a recommended update!

 

[fat jez]

It is so bad Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave! It's inside job. That. Bad.

Do you honestly believe Steve Jobs would not have signed off on these changes? I think it will be a good 2-3 years before we see design changes that he didn't approve before he passed away.

The main thing for me is that it seems we can forget about support for non-Lion Macs, since they didn't bother to make the 5.6 client compatible with SL (I can't believe there is anything in it which needs Lion to run a network config client!).

 

[Henk Poley]

WTF, they removed connection quality statistics and what band is used in 'automatic' mode? I literally could not have had my current reliable network without the quality metrics.

The amount iron used in the walls here gives the odd condition that sometimes you have no reception within 3m distance of the access point.

http://apple.com/feedback ..


[Edit] The current transmit statistics (speed, RSSI, wifi protocol) is visible if you hover over a MAC address the pop out. No graph anymore though.

 

[AppleMacFinder]

Send feedback and ask them to return the features!

Send feedback and ask them to return the features!
http://www.apple.com/feedback/airportextreme.html

 

[Bauer24]

Hm, judging from the complaints I don't think I'll be installing this update. I don't like having my OS X experience dumbed down.

Agreed. What's with the weird "update"?

 

[haruhiko]

Very disappointed by this update. Looks nice, but many options have disappeared. I miss the "Allow this network to be extended" option the mot; it is crucial for my network setup! Restoring the older Airport Utility via Time Capsule is not allowed, unfortunately... Not a recommended update!

You can easily extend your network using another airport router by this utility.

 

[star-affinity]

Another thing which is nice for the dummy user, but which I find a security flaw is the fact that you can see all passwords for your airport device.

Agree, it's quite bad.
Same thing in the iOS version – once one have logged onto the AirPort device it is possible to use the AirPOrt Utility app to check the password one has set for the WiFi network. I'd like to se a way to disable this or at least give us a way to lock the AirPort Utility app.

As it is now if I have guests at home that borrow my iOS device they can just open the AirPort Utility app and go and check the WiFi password I have set up.