What new features COULD they add to a refreshed Airport Extreme?

They COULD add a kettle and a dishwasher.

 

Well there's the faster speeds and longer range that people are always looking for. I'm expecting a case redesign similar to that of the unibody Mac Mini, and possible addition of OS 5.

 

- Extra band (three bands instead of two)
- iOS 5

 

Port for an external antenna
Support for 3G/4G USB modem
Official support for Time Machine backup to AirDisk
iTunes server on AirDisk
Ftp,Http,etc server


There is an endless amount of features they could add, like the ones I listed above. I highly doubt they would even consider adding any of them.

This is also very unlikely. The metal casing would cause too much interference with the wireless signal, hence why it is all plastic now. This could be avoided if they added external antennas, but thats not going to happen.

 

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

It'll prob be either a4 or a5 powered making it 'greener' so to speak. It needs more LAN ports IMHO

 

An AirDisk that works properly.

 

All consumer routers are poor with just 4 LAN ports. The AEBS with 3 is pathetic.

6 ports would be the absolute bare minimum. I would have to be 8 to consider it well specified.

And it should provide a bit of PoE.

 

PoE would be awesome

I also forgot to add QoS to my list. QoS is necessary and its a standard feature in pretty much every consumer router.

 

Never gonna happen. It would render the Time Capsule pointless.

 

So, what you're saying is that the right thing to do is to remove AirDisk from the AEBS.

That menans many people would just not buy any Apple router thing.

I'm avoiding Apple routers anyway. I should have followed my instinct.

 

i think they need to integrate all the current airplay features into one device, and call that the new AEBS. give it airtunes, appletv, usb ports, and hdmi ports. make it so that i can connect it to my modem, my tv, stereo, printer, and external hard drive so that i can listen to music, watch tv, print, and time machine all from the one device. they can still sell the apple tv to those that only want a tv connection, sell the current express to those that only want print and music and portability, and give time capsule some larger drive space.

 

Thunderbolt ports and lower cost

 

If they could make the thing run cooler, that would be a huge benefit. I don't think much needs to be changed.

 

Any rumors about supporting ftp to the shared disk attached through USB?

That would make my day!

 

QoS, AirPrint, AirPlay server, local iCloud, Thunderbolt port, no reboot for changing settings, bandwidth monitoring and notification (for ISP with bandwidth cap)

 

The only additional feature I need is an iTunes server function over airDisk. Anything else is gravy.

 

Too, too, toooooo much!

1. As a matter of fact, you don't have to reboot the router for every change you make. And most routers on the market don't do that. The fact is (for most routers on the market): minor change are just saved and in effect immediately; other changes may require rebooting some service but not the entire router firmware. Only very major changes would require a router reboot. I really hate that AEBS/AXBS have to reboot even for a tiniest change to the settings, and not to mention how slow the reboots can be.


2. We should have custom MTU settings on the router since not all ISPs use the standard MTU (this is important for PPPoE users). Since the router support. Since AEBS is like many other routers that has a gigabit switch built in. A setting should be there making it clear that the router switch passes all jumbo frame packages which travel inside the LAN, meanwhile breaks all the outgoing package strictly according to the MTU settings.


3. The Apple routers (AEBS/AXBS) should be more compatible with other routers in terms of "Extending wireless network" and "WDS" . Non-apple routers should be able to extend an existing Airport network; vice versa, apple routers should be able to join a WDS created by other non-apple routers or extend a wifi created by other routers.


4. we should be able to load our PPTP/L2TP/OpenVPN account settings directly to the AEBS so that the entire LAN can share that VPN connection.


5. Apple should have better documentations and manuals for their routers. Explain every details of the router settings to full extent. And also everything else -- like what exactly those SNMP interfaces are -- as most of the interface names are not self-explanatory.


6. It seems unless you turn on that "Show Airport Status on Menu Bar" you won't be able to disconnect an internet connection and reconnect, you will have to do a hard reboot on your AEBS to refresh the internet connection.


7. I don't understand why Apple has to make the web interface router management impossible? The airport utilities apparently has bugs, one of them being unable to find the the apple router after a reboot (keep going with the "Rescan" button but it just won't find your router though it has been back to normal state -- you have to quit the utility and relaunch it). An http://192.168.1.1 access would be so much easier and straight. Of course we'd still need the Utility for firmware update, if there would ever be one.


5. Other Functions? Just look at DD-WRT. That's what we need. When people consider a new router, so many of them all over the world would first factor in the compatibility of their candidate routers with DD-WRT -- they do that for a reason.

OK about the DD-WRT thing I know Apple never want to make people feel intimidated. But you can make 2 entries for the settings: a "Basic Mode" and "Advanced Mode". Many products have used this trick and have made "dummies" and "geeks" both happy.



7. The USB for print server should be radically improved to support scanners.


8. The AirDisk -- I want to restrict the access to the AirDisk using an account -- like you always do with a NAS. But why that makes me have two 2 volumes (partitions, though i know they are just logical ones not the real) in the Airdisk? This part i really can't understand. I can get it if it automatically creates a folder for each user account, kind of "Home folder", but why different "volumes"??


For the next generation of Airport Extreme:

1. There should at least be 2 USB on it, one for the printer device. And the other for the AirDisk. And at least one of them should be USB 3.0. It would be really great if a Firewire 800 and ESATA connectors could be there too. Because these have been very popular interfaces for hard drive enclosures.

2. Dual WAN.

3. A reboot button/Wifi ON-OFF control would be nice.

4. Co-existence of web-base admin interface with Airport Utility would be nice. Maybe the Airport Utility remains the same UI and is meant to be basic settings. Why the web-base admin pages has an option for "Advance" or "Expert mode".

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For what I'm thinking, Apple is kinda done with their routers (at least, very very low priority) though I do hope I'm wrong.