Perhaps not unexpected, but for many of us, disappointing. We can all venture a guess as to the actual reasoning why. Will leave that for others here at MacInTouch. Me, I am questioning, 'what is next?' Will we continue to received firmware updates to fix future security problems? Sounds like they broke up the band. So, to me it is doubtful.
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Time to move on, or at least plan for a future replacement as needed.If not Apple's routers, then whose should we choose? Our internet service providers in most cases provide a very decent Wi-Fi router with their service. But, do we have full control of that device in a manner we want? In some cases that answer is, 'no.' Otherwise, we wouldn't be using an Apple AirPort device. So, who has the wireless routers and access points today we can rely on?
Let that conversation begin. I think I will begin by looking at the new Google Wifi mesh system. Anyone have any experience with it? (2016-11-21 at 14:57)Guest wrote: If not Apple's routers, then whose should we choose? Our internet service providers in most cases provide a very decent Wi-Fi router with their service. But, do we have full control of that device in a manner we want?' Full control' is subjective.
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Unless you are inclined to, there will be things you can't do, some of which you might want.That having been said, I have been pretty happy using routers in my home. But this model is several years old and doesn't support 802.11ac Wi-Fi, so you may want to consider something else.I like Linksys products, but friends tell me that current models are not as good as those sold in prior years.
I suspect the overall quality is going to depend greatly on the specific model you choose.And, of course, if there is a specific feature you require, you should do some web searching and ask questions to make sure the model you select has that feature.The most disappointing thing about Apple leaving this sector of the market is that there will be no Mac-integrated configuration/management tool. Instead, you'll have to use the router's web-based configuration interface, which may take a bit of getting used to.I've also noticed that Linksys routers these days offer, which lets you manage and configure them remotely via an app. I personally don't like this idea, but you don't need to set it up. You can just install a local password in your router and manage it entirely via a web browser on a local computer on your LAN, which is what I do in my home.
(2016-11-21 at 17:13)macanix wrote: None of those allow audio to external amp/speakers with iTunes, which is the reason I have an Extreme with multiple Expresses throughout the home/shop/yard: to use the (bloated and poor GUI) iTunes library to play music on/over my wifi/LAN. Along with the security of it (the positive feature of not being Web-managed).Of course Apple's non-Express routers also lack audio outputs, but there's an.I'm not sure how third-party iOS apps compare to AirPort Utility for configuring some of these newer routers.
Suggests a few alternative routers. Their suggestions are:.
($330). Wi-Fi Tri-band (1000Mbps at 2.4GHz, 2 bands of 2167Mbps at 5GHz) with 8 detachable antennae and beam-forming.
4GigE LAN ports, a WAN port, 1 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0 port. Has a configuration app. Can run DD-WRT firmware if you're so inclined. ($150). Wi-Fi up to 1750Mbps, 3 antennae with beam-forming. 4 GigE ports, 1 WAN port, 1 USB 3.0 (for a hard drive for file sharing) and 1 USB 2.0 port (for printer and other device sharing.) Attached printers will be AirPrint compatible. Configuration via app or web browser.
($85). Wi-Fi up to 1750Mbps, 6 antennae (3 internal, 3 external). 4 GigE ports, 1 WAN port, 2 USB 2.0 ports for media/file/printer sharing. Configuration via app or web browser. ($125). Like the C7, but adds beam-forming and upgrades one USB port to 3.0.
($500 for a 3 base station starter kit, $350 for a 2-station starter, extra units for $200 each). These are meant for creating a mesh of connectivity throughout a home. The AppleInsider review doesn't mention any details but the says that each unit has two 802.11ac radios (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and 5 antennae with 2x2 MIMO. 2 GigE ports, which may be either LAN or WAN and one USB 2.0 port.
Configuration via an app. Not a lot of detailed tech specs - their target audience is clearly people who want it to be easy, not power users. Despite the fact that it is likely to be dropped, it is supported now. You may want to buy one (and maybe a spare or two) now and wait until they stop working to think about an alternative.AppleInsider recommends against a Google OnHub. While easy to use, it isn't a very good router and it is virtually unconfigurable if you don't have an active Internet connection.Google has announced 'Google WiFi', which promises to be like Eero, but less expensive. But we don't know much about it.
Best to wait until there are some good reviews.They choose to not recommend anything in the sub-$75 price range. They consider them not-generally reliable and may not get any security updates.
For units from no-name manufacturers, I would tend to agree. For older/discounted units from big names (Cisco/Linksys, D-Link, Netgear), I wouldn't have a problem recommending one, but be aware that older units may not have the hardware to support modern features like 802.11ac and beam-forming. On the one hand, I swore to never buy another AirPort after Apple pulled the dirty trick of removing features in AirPort Utility 6. And despite the reputation of AirPort routers being bullet proof, I had to reboot mine just this weekend after Internet access slowed to a crawl.On the other hand, what happens to support for Apple technologies such as:. Time Machine. Back to My Mac. AirPlay of uncompressed audio.
Bounjour sleep proxy (lets computers in sleep mode continue sharing services.and anything else that is only fully supported on AirPort routers? While I can understand that Apple didn't make huge profits out of products like Time Capsule and Airport Express, they do represent something that is Apple-unique.Others have pointed out all the things that those products allow when used with other Apple products.
I will miss Airport music streaming via AirPort Express. There is still no other device that matches its functionality, even though Google Chromecast Audio claims to do that:(try to find some technical specs about the audio stream if you can-there's nothing on the web site).It seems to me that the Apple ecosystem is being killed by a thousand cuts and is becoming non-viable as general computing platform.
I cannot understand the shortsightedness of selling laptops at premium prices while removing all the premium features and ecosystem that made the Mac great in the first place. If all I get is generic and commoditized functionality, then why should I pay a premium price?
I expect that AirPort sales have dropped, since it has become quite usual for our broadband suppliers to give us a wireless router rather than a wired one. It adds complexity and confusion to plug an AirPort into a wifi router, and even I, happy to play with my Time Capsule and set it to bridging mode, prefer to leave the arcane web interface of my Actiontec largely untouched.If Apple stop selling AirPorts, I don't doubt they will make some deal as they did with LG to sell a preferred brand of router through both brick & mortar and online Apple Stores. In return it will come with instructions that make it usable for the neophytes who buy most of Apple's computers these days.I'm not sure what will happen to Time Machine in this scenario, as adding Time Machine disks that aren't in Time Capsules or directly attached isn't so easy for those new owners. Fortunately I have a few older Time Capsules and a bunch of Buffalo NAS I can use, if I have to (the Buffalo web interface definitely makes me want to slash my throat and get it over with).It won't be long before the Mac line-up is reduced to two models of laptop and two sizes of iMac, and when that happens, we know their days are numbered. (2016-11-22 at 01:04)Davide Guarisco wrote: It seems to me that the Apple ecosystem is being killed by a thousand cuts and is becoming non-viable as general computing platform.
I cannot understand the shortsightedness of selling laptops at premium prices while removing all the premium features and ecosystem that made the Mac great in the first place. If all I get is generic and commoditized functionality, then why should I pay a premium price?I'm afraid you just answered your own question.I have an Airport Time Capsule-based mixed Ethernet-WiFi home network with four Airport Expresses for music streaming and an Airport Extreme network extender. I couldn't begin to replace this stuff with generic gear - I've learned the Apple system from the gray flying saucer onwards, and I'm not prepared to switch.I've begun to imagine an end to the Macintosh. This is unhappy news, as I was planning to buy my first 'tall' Airport Extreme next year.
Guess now I will do it sooner rather than later. The admin controls are plenty sufficient for my simple residential needs, and I actually appreciate the proprietary admin interface, rather than the Web-based controls of other routers. I feel it's inherently safer, in light of the many revelations about backdoors and vulnerabilities in other consumer level routers.Despite the lack of upgrades in recent years, it should last me through dodder-hood and well into decrepitude. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. Way back in the 1990's, the silver Apple Airport router was revolutionary, because it brought wireless surfing to the masses. It was relatively easy to set up, and the only Apple hardware contribution was the plastic shell.
The guts had been developed by Lucent (which was also the OEM supplier for the Apple 'Airport' PCMCIA cards) and licensed to Apple exclusively for a year. Thanks to Mr. Ive's heat-trapping design, the cheap Lelon capacitors used by Lucent failed pretty consistently after a year of use (or sooner, if you used the dial-up modem).The Airport system was one of the main differentiators for Apple vs. PC's for several years: Apple users could surf on a couch, etc. While PC folk were, by and large, tethered while at home. This feature (and the Lucent exclusive, locking out the residential competition) was one way for Apple to justify a higher initial system purchase price (including the computers) - the cost of being part of a ecosystem where stuff was easy to set up, and just worked.
(And, yes, the Apple base station setup software in the early days could have been a lot better, but it still beat the competition by a mile.)Later Airport iterations were developed in-house and switched from the 486 processor in the silver UFO edition to RISC processors in the later white models. While the Apple hardware may not have been cutting edge re: the latest and greatest RF chipsets, the units were solidly built - the widespread failures of the Lucent era did not re-occur.Print servers, audio-out, and USB ports for Time Machine backups allowed people to do more with their existing hardware than they could before they acquired a Apple base station. Now, a cheap USB printer could become a network model, you could convert a existing stereo into something similar to a Sonos system, and a Time Machine backup no longer required a computer to sit at a desk with a hard drive attached to it. These are all great differentiators, and they are important to a lot of people.What I liked most about the system, though, was that it just worked. The firmwares were solid, and updating the units (when needed) was trivial and pretty much automatic. Unlike competitors, Apple Airport subsystems didn't have a endless train of bugs / vulnerabilities that had been solved by their respective chipset suppliers 10+ years ago (the WSJ had a great ).
Unlike competitors, Apple gear usually became obsolete before it died.But, Apple may not be interested in it anymore for a simple reason: no ongoing income stream.It's not like Apple doesn't have a few billion in the bank to afford the modest efforts needed to keep their Airport product line going. Plus, Airport hardware always seemed to be sold at a healthy margin.
But remember my rants about IGG/Adobe/Apple getting seduced by subscription models and ruining their products in the process? Well, this is another symptom.
Neither the Apple Thunderbolt display nor Airport will provide an ongoing income stream. Unlike the latest Macbooks, there is no fingerprint reader, no Siri, etc. To invoke and result in a app purchase, for example.Hence, a simple prediction: future Apple standalone keyboards and perhaps even mice will have a fingerprint reader. Anything to make it easier to part us from our money.However, abandoning the Airport infrastructure carries enormous risk for Apple. The less 'it just works' the Apple ecosystem becomes, the greater the temptation for people to wholesale switch to rival platforms. For now, the current lineup of Apple Airport hardware / software should fulfill the average user needs, even if the 802.11n found in the Express is more than a bit geriatric at this point. The 802.11ac MIMO array found in the bigger Extreme will easily saturate most home ISP connections, as long as the computer actually manages to maintain such high throughputs (i.e.
Sit right next to the base station).Those who need faster sustained transfer speeds should likely avoid wireless altogether - i.e. Consider gigabit or nBASE-T copper ethernet, fiber-channel, or even 10GB (usually fiber-optic) instead. Good luck with finding reasonably-priced hardware above gigabit-level speeds, however, especially if it's supposed to be easily set up, energy-efficient, quiet enough for home use, etc. For example, Ubiquiti, and Mikrotik have some very nice hardware whose widespread adoption is likely stymied by atrocious user interfaces that only make a lot of sense to trained network engineers. This is especially true for Mikrotik - Ubiquiti at least makes an effort to put together a https-based setup wizard for common configurations. But it's still a lot harder than it should be.So, I sense an opportunity for someone to come up with a good app that allows Macs to configure a limited set of non-Apple wireless base stations and other network equipment with an interface that is comprehensible, easy to navigate, and which applies firmware updates as needed. For example, the average user won't know why WPA2 with AES is a much better choice than WPA with TKIP.
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They just want it to work, provide adequate security to keep the script-kiddies out, etc. All of which will likely require a subscription model to keep going. (2016-11-21 at 19:11)David Charlap wrote: ($500 for a 3 base station starter kit, $350 for a 2-station starter, extra units for $200 each). These are meant for creating a mesh of connectivity throughout a home. The AppleInsider review doesn't mention any details but the says that each unit has two 802.11ac radios (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and 5 antennae with 2x2 MIMO. 2 GigE ports, which may be either LAN or WAN and one USB 2.0 port.
Configuration via an app. Not a lot of detailed tech specs - their target audience is clearly people who want it to be easy, not power users.I'm not sure what you mean by 'power users', but the Airport and the Eero offer about the same functionality in terms of power user features. I have a set of Eero - the Advanced Settings page of the app offers:. Internet Connection: DHCP or Static IP. DNS: ISP Default or Custom.
DHCP & NAT: Automatic, Manual IP, Bridge. Reservations and Port Forwarding: Assign IP reservations and port forwarding rules for all the devices on your eero network.
Start by adding a reservation, under Learn More they have:IP Reservations allow you to keep the same IP address for a particular devicePort forwarding is used for certain applications like games which need direct connections to other devices on the Internet. UPnP: On/Off ToggleAre there some other settings besides the USB storage and BTMM that it is missing for a moderate power user? (2016-11-22 at 12:42)Constantin wrote: Thanks to Mr. Ive's heat-trapping design, the cheap Lelon capacitors used by Lucent failed pretty consistently after a year of use (or sooner, if you used the dial-up modem).This would be incorrect, the stolen (I may be wrong about this stolen part) only partially-complete design for the capacitors plagued the industry in general for many years; this was not an Ive's heat-trapping design issues, as evidenced by swapping the capacitors and not seeing the problem anymore. When built to the specs originally designed, it works fine.You can read about the toxic capacitors here:Wikipedia wrote::Industrial espionage was implicated in the capacitor plague, in connection with the theft of an electrolyte formula. A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte.
Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan, undercutting the prices of the Japanese manufacturers. This incomplete electrolyte lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors and was unstable when packaged in a finished aluminum capacitor. This faulty electrolyte allowed the unimpeded formation of hydroxide and produced hydrogen gas.There are no known public court proceedings related to alleged theft of electrolyte formulas. However, one independent laboratory analysis of defective capacitors has shown that many of the premature failures appear to be associated with high water content and missing inhibitors in the electrolyte, as described below. (2016-11-22 at 10:00)Christopher Moss wrote: It won't be long before the Mac line-up is reduced to two models of laptop and two sizes of iMac, and when that happens, we know their days are numbered.Funny you should put it that way, since that is exactly what Steve Jobs did to/for Apple when he first returned as 'iCEO'.
He slashed away the product lines into only four products - two laptops and two desktops, each with a high-end and low-end model: iBook (low-end laptop), PowerBook (high-end laptop), iMac (low-end desktop) and Power Mac (high-end desktop.)It worked remarkably well back then, even though pundits were declaring it to be the beginning of the end for the whole company.(2016-11-22 at 13:29)Sofakinbd wrote: I'm not sure what you mean by 'power users', but the Airport and the Eero offer about the same functionality in terms of power user features. I have a set of Eero - the Advanced Settings page of the app offers.I'm referring to the fact that the product description page does not mention important things like the total amount of bandwidth/throughput, what you can do with those USB ports, and other similarly low-level tech specs. They focus entirely on how easy it is to set up a mesh of devices to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe they have good specs and comparable features, but their web site doesn't say anything one way or the other.Ease of use is important, but I see red flags when a manufacturer's published spec sheet deliberately avoids publishing the kind of specs that the competition routinely publishes. It makes me wonder if maybe those specs aren't very good and they are trying to hide the information, figuring that their target customers (those who consider ease of use far more important than anything else) won't care.
Maybe their specs actually are competitive, but I can't tell from their ad copy. Sofakinbd,While Lelon may or may not have conducted botched espionage, the capacitors Proxim/Lucent/Avaya/etc. Fitted inside the RG1000/Airport, etc. Were teeny compared to units I sourced from Panasonic/Nichicon/etc.of the same era. In my experience, aluminum electrolytic capacitors grow larger as temperature rating, operating voltage, and desired capacitance increase. The Lelon capacitor choice inside the Airport seemed to be driven substantially by height, i.e.
So as not to touch the RFI shield / carrier.I'll also note that the silver AirPort base station got toasty hot on the outside when used with the modem, which doesn't help aluminum electrolytic capacitors stay functional; their life will be shortened. There is a online for that base station.All things being equal, cooler electronic assemblies will typically last longer. None of 10+ silver base stations with replacement capacitors and holes I modified for friends and family ever experienced a hardware failure. Tellingly, later Airport Extreme designs feature either active or passive ventilation via holes in the case. The notable exceptions are the first-generation Extreme and all Express generations, whose anemic RF performance may very well be a function of thermal management considerations due to their enclosed designs.
See iFixit's, which even features a fan. (2016-11-22 at 14:16)David Charlap wrote: I'm referring to the fact that the product description page does not mention important things like the total amount of bandwidth/throughput, what you can do with those USB ports, and other similarly low-level tech specs. They focus entirely on how easy it is to set up a mesh of devices to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe they have good specs and comparable features, but their web site doesn't say anything one way or the other.Ease of use is important, but I see red flags when a manufacturer's published spec sheet deliberately avoids publishing the kind of specs that the competition routinely publishes. It makes me wonder if maybe those specs aren't very good and they are trying to hide the information, figuring that their target customers (those who consider ease of use far more important than anything else) won't care. Maybe their specs actually are competitive, but I can't tell from their ad copy.Fair enough.
Some considering Eero may like to see the 2.0 features that just came out:Eero wrote:Overnight, eero customers will see up to 2x the speed within their network, far greater intelligence in how their network adapts to their home, and flexibility to add even more eeros to their system.They are doing some pretty cool stuff, IMHO. Well,.The Airports have been the orthopedic shoes of the Apple offerings. Exciting as watching paint dry, but you really appreciate it when it works.
I finally replaced an Extreme after 8 years of service - those kind of reliable devices are getting harder to come. Furthermore, while I don't strictly look for design, it was nice to have something that I could have in my living room, instead of some stupid Transformer-looking device with 6 antennas, and enough lights to throw some tinsel on it for the holidays.I also replaced other routers with, and recommended the Airports plenty of times - always with the disclaimer 'You'll spend more, but I can almost assure you you'll save money in the long run.' Geez, Apple, stop making it so difficult to recommend your products anymore. (2016-11-21 at 22:55)Michael Schmitt wrote: On the other hand, what happens to support for Apple technologies such as Time MachineWestern Digital drives support Time Machine. I've found my EX2 model to be pretty reliable with it, though I've only restored individual files, not a full boot or auxiliary drive.WD's may also support Time Machine, dunno, I've never used them for that.
I've got a 2TB and a 3TB unit of these and their 'firmware' has not had an update for many months, maybe 1 year. Essentially obsolete IMO.The My Cloud gets firmware updates every 2-3 months, and the web interface is much nicer than for the My Book Lives.Both models are slow, consumer-grade devices, peaking on my Gigabit Ethernet from my Ethernet iMac at about 60 MBps write for non-Time Machine large file copies for the faster EX2 and 30 MBps for the Lives; with Time Machine, the EX2 has adequate speed for WiFi-based backups of my MacBook Air and the Mini (the iMac backs up to a local USB drive instead).
I will miss the limited disk sharing over the internet and Back to My Mac functions.I had been holding out to get the latest AirPort, as my current unit is old and I think dying, but now it looks like there is no point in waiting if there will be no new, even better AirPort that supports the Apple features I like.I know other routers that allow disk shares but none seem to work seamlessly from the Finder like the airdisk feature. I find that really really useful, as I do not want to keep everything on iCloud, and in practice iCloud is too limited. My older Macs, which work just fine but can't run newer OS revs, can't connect to the new iCloud services anymore.
Very frustrating. But they can all connect (even the Windows machines) to the shared airdisk. I could set up an SMB type server and port-map it through some other router, but that is just one more box to fail, and the AirPort disk was quick and easy and solid.Do any other routers offer something similar for sharing files online that can easily be mounted to the client filesystem from pretty much anywhere? (2016-11-22 at 18:07)goldenthal wrote: Can you recommend any wired (ethernet) router makes of known reliability and ease of use?Just about every major-brand (and most other) Wi-Fi router has multiple Ethernet ports.These devices are typically 2- or 3-port routers. One router port is the WAN Ethernet port. One will be your LAN port (if you have multiple LAN ports, they are almost certainly bridged together via an internal Ethernet switch, attaching to a single internal router port.) The Wi-Fi will either be a third router port or may be bridged to the same LAN port that the LAN Ethernet ports all share.These days, the only consumer-grade routers I can find without Wi-Fi are integrated with cable modems or DSL modems. Those that don't use modems for the WAN interface include Wi-Fi.
But I wouldn't worry about it. You can always configure the router to disable the Wi-Fi interface.Professional routers (not sold for personal use) are a completely different story. For these, each Ethernet port will be (or can be configured to be) a separate router port and they generally will not include any Wi-Fi access point. But these are also usually large devices (designed for rack mounting) with loud fans and are likely to be too expensive to consider using for a home network. They may also be difficult to configure properly without some amount of training.
(2016-11-22 at 19:20)David Charlap wrote: Professional routers (not sold for personal use) are a completely different story. For these, each Ethernet port will be (or can be configured to be) a separate router port and they generally will not include any Wi-Fi access point. But these are also usually large devices (designed for rack mounting) with loud fans and are likely to be too expensive to consider using for a home network. They may also be difficult to configure properly without some amount of training.There are lots of entry-level professional sub-rack-size routers.
I'm familiar with the Fortigate line; the two-digit model numbers (30/50/70) are almost all sub-rack size and come with and without wifi. Sonicwall and Watchguard also have small models (or did when I last comparison shopped a year or two ago.) They aren't loud.I agree about the pricing and configuration difficulty, though for a vanilla usage (NAT with ISP DHCP), the Fortigates were close to plug-and-play before I reconfigured them. Wicked overkill for home use. Kirk McElhearn linked to a timely and helpful review of three of the mesh WiFi systems, eero, Orbi and AmpliFi.As another poster pointed out, many of us have Airport Extreme or Time Machine units as well as the router supplied by an ISP. In the course of troubleshooting audio dropouts across a wireless connection, I realized that enabling separate wireless networks on the ISP and the Apple Device (which are connected by Ethernet) allows a dedicated (single end-point) wireless link to the audio device (in my case, a Logitech Squeezebox.) That is, the Squeezebox is the only device on the ISP router's network; everything else is on the Time Machine network. This configuration is not a mesh, but it performs a similar function of offloading traffic, although in a non-dynamic way. It's early days, but so far, this has eliminated dropouts.What's more, the browser-based LAN interface for the ISP's router provides functions that have disappeared from Airport Utility.(2016-11-22 at 15:41)Sofakinbd wrote: (2016-11-22 at 14:16)David Charlap wrote: I'm referring to the fact that the product description page does not mention important things like the total amount of bandwidth/throughput, what you can do with those USB ports, and other similarly low-level tech specs.
They focus entirely on how easy it is to set up a mesh of devices to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe they have good specs and comparable features, but their web site doesn't say anything one way or the other.Ease of use is important, but I see red flags when a manufacturer's published spec sheet deliberately avoids publishing the kind of specs that the competition routinely publishes. It makes me wonder if maybe those specs aren't very good and they are trying to hide the information, figuring that their target customers (those who consider ease of use far more important than anything else) won't care. Maybe their specs actually are competitive, but I can't tell from their ad copy.Fair enough.
Some considering Eero may like to see the 2.0 features that just came out:Eero wrote:Overnight, eero customers will see up to 2x the speed within their network, far greater intelligence in how their network adapts to their home, and flexibility to add even more eeros to their system.They are doing some pretty cool stuff, IMHO. When Time-Warner gave me a new Arris high-speed cable modem when I upgraded to 100mb/s, it came with built-in WiFi. I thought it worthwhile to check out.
I had been using an Airport Extreme in bridge mode, connecting to an Airport Express for audio in my kitchen, an Apple TV in my bedroom, and various laptops. The Arris worked perfectly well, so I sold the Airport Extreme on eBay. That was a couple of years ago and I don't miss it. But I will miss the Express if it dies. What non-Apple device replaces that for streaming audio? (2016-11-21 at 20:50)dvhwgumby wrote: I use Airplay video (mostly only to put Amazon video on the TV), and my kid is a heavy user of AirPlay audio (via an old Express) to blast his fugues through the kitchen speakers.
I know those old AirPorts wear out; what's the best option then?If you needed to replace an Express for audio (when they are no longer available), you could use an Apple TV 3 and an HDMI audio splitter. Costs about the same as Express and looks lots uglier:) (I haven't seen a splitter that was even a bit sleek.)I do this with an old Apple TV but without the splitter (I discovered the TV I used setting it up had surprisingly good speakers, and just left it in place; of course my hearing is shot. Over the course of the last 15 years or so, I have recommended/sold/replaced just about every major brand of router for my clients. While some are supposed to be 'high-end' like Cisco-Linksys, just about all of the major brands, other than Apple, have lifespans that rarely exceed 2 years of operation in a normal home and less than 1 year in a busy office.
I can't tell you how many wireless routers I have seen last more than that period of time, other than the Apple brand.One particular law firm in downtown Toronto used to go through a router every 9 to 12 months, and believe me, we were putting in the best we could find, and still replacing them constantly. I put in an Airport Extreme 2 1/2 years ago and it's still working like a charm. (2016-11-21 at 17:13)macanix wrote: None of those allow audio to external amp/speakers with iTunes, which is the reason I have an Extreme with multiple Expresses throughout the home/shop/yard: to use the (bloated and poor GUI) iTunes library to play music on/over my wifi/LAN. Along with the security of it (the positive feature of not being Web-managed).Apple's basically partnered with Sonos, which is an infinitely better system than Airport Expresses ever were for that problem - though more costly.Still, I liked Extremes and Expresses. I just recently picked up, for $24, a 5th-generation flat Extreme, which is now my primary router. My 1st-generation one has my HP printer plugged into it.
I might have to just go buy a new printer. This one's 12 years old, and doesn't have wireless printing.
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