Deals: Refurbished Orbi Mesh Wi-Fi Routers Discounted by Up to 50% at Woot Today Only, Starting at $175

[sirozha]

I think the revenue growth for the next quarter is the iPhone and the Macs. Apple needs to start releasing Apple Silicon based iMacs and 16" / 14" MacBook Pros ASAP. This is the time to take the marketshare from Wintel. When IT departments realize how superior Apple Silicon based computers are, they will be much more willing to ramp up their adoption in the enterprise. I have never seen a MacBook Pro handle tasks with such ease as my M1 MacBook Air. Nothing even phases it. If Apple waits too long, Windows will come out on ARM comparable with Apple Silicon performance.

 

[Earl Urley]

I’m still using Apples time capsule and airport express, is anyone else?

Still using my Airport Extreme 802.11ac and am still happy with it, but there's a catch- I got an EdgeRouter X (non-SFP) as the main router.

I've got a printer, a few cams, HomePod, AppleTV, homemade RAID using a beat up 2012 Mini, and some other IoT devices along with several phones and a ChromeCast / multifunction TV. Using the AEBS alone to support all of that simultaneously was beginning to overtax it as I was getting lots of annoying breaks in my streaming and unreliable connections, plus some devices just decided they weren't getting enough attention somehow, and would unceremoniously and without warning, drop off the network.

When I got the ER-X, I just did a detailed setup following some online guides, made sure the hardware offloading was enabled, and relegated the AEBS to the main WiFi access hub only (Bridge Mode.) Since that time, all my breaks / dropoffs disappeared overnight, and there hasn't been so much as a single glitch with the web once I programmed the ER/X to use the cable service's DNS along with Google and several others.

I'm only using three of the ports (one as the main input from the cable modem, one to a wired hub for all the IoT crap, and one to the AEBS for WiFi) and shut down the rest until I might need the ports for something else. VLANs across the board for each group too.

I honestly believe using the AEBS for the main router was a good idea up to the point that I went past its breakeven point of providing WiFi and routing; now that something else is doing the routing, it's perfectly fine serving up the connections while the ER-X plays the concierge.

I think there's still a lot of life left in the AEBS as the WiFi access point, but will likely replace it when it does eventuallly fall to component failure and replace it with a NetGear ORBI or EERO (the latter if it's possible to de-Google-ize it but from what I'm reading ATM that's a fool's errand) because by that time I figure I'll have at least one M1-M2 based Mac and all the M1s currently have WiFi 6..