Extremely Disappointing: Apple Airport Extreme Reviewed

[thetoad30]

...especially on my own dime.

Agree to that part. Maybe someday you'll come across one of the previous dual-band models and you can test it just for fun!

 

[thiggins]

There is a post over on xlr8yourmac.com from a user who still claims that the new Airport Extreme is a three antenna design.

I purchased the latest model. But there is more to the story. Update coming soon.

 

[thiggins]

Here's the update.
More Surprises From The New Airport Extreme

 

[Danny]

Good on you!

Thanks for your yeoman's job on this review, and your subsequent follow-ups. It's been interesting following along.

Good to see the legions of AppleNut flame-bots haven't infested these forums. …Yet. Heck, your efforts are worth a mention on daringfireball.net.

 

[Unregistered]

Have you contacted apple to see what they say? Ask for a return since you don't think it's hooked up correctly?

 

[thiggins]

Have you contacted apple to see what they say? Ask for a return since you don't think it's hooked up correctly?

I voided the warranty the second I opened it up. Besides, I've already fixed it.

 

[thetoad30]

I voided the warranty the second I opened it up. Besides, I've already fixed it.

What you don't realize is that Apple knew their 3x3 design wouldn't be secret, but that by reversing the antennas they have created a secret way to inverse the space time continuum and make wormholes.

Seriously, though, I am not happy with Apple right now. I took my MacBook in for some cracking on the case that I wanted fixed, and learned that it was a known defect. Really? Known? Because I hadn't heard anything about it and I have an Apple ID. An e-mail or a snail mail card to tell me something's wrong would have been good customer service, Apple... they seem to hide all they can. What happened to customer service? I'd gladly pay more for customer service if that's what had to be done. But Apple just over-charges for the same stuff and doesn't deliver the service that you'd expect to come based on the tooting of their own horn.

 

[thiggins]

Apple isn't alone in not informing customers of "known problems". Companies in general only inform customers of safety-related problems because of liability. Otherwise, it's tough noogies.

 

[Unregistered]

Will you show how the antenna are supposed to be connected? Did you swap the order of the amp connectors where there are 4 in a row?

 

[thetoad30]

Apple isn't alone in not informing customers of "known problems". Companies in general only inform customers of safety-related problems because of liability. Otherwise, it's tough noogies.

This I agree with. What I was trying to point out is that Apple boasts itself as being the best company with the best customer service.

Notice that once Dell was sued, they stopped using that claim. All I'm saying is that Apple is saying one thing, and doing another. Not that it's a surprise in this world anymore. It's just blatantly lying through it's teeth.

 

[thiggins]

Will you show how the antenna are supposed to be connected? Did you swap the order of the amp connectors where there are 4 in a row?

The information is in the article, i.e. swap the connections to the radio module AP3 and 4.

 

[zjohnr]

Remember! Don't void your warranty!

The information is in the article, i.e. swap the connections to the radio module AP3 and 4.

If you want to preserve your warranty I suggest that you get the "techs" at your local Apple Store to do the antenna swap for you. All you have to do is to explain it to them. You could take along a copy of Tim's article as a presentation aid.

I'm sure they'll gladly help once they understand ... or not.

I'd love to see a video of that conversation posted to youtube ...

-irrational (obviously) john

 

[ltattoo]

shocking...

i've been doing research on the airport extreme this morning. i was shocked to learn of the apple tech error... good work and thanks for alerting us.

Here's the update.
More Surprises From The New Airport Extreme

 

[Unregistered]

Advantage of Airport Extreme?

I recently bought a wndr3700 (haven't opened it yet) due to the great reviews on the site, but I realized that I can't mount a mac formatted drive on the USB connection. I'm deciding whether or not to deal with setting up time machine to use a windows share or just deal with the less than optimal performance of the Airport Extreme? I was wondering if any of the open source firmwares allow you to mount mac volumes yet?

Any insights would be appreciated.

 

[thiggins]

There is no open source firmware available yet for the WND3700. But Open WRT is working on it.

 

[Marxes]

Is it true that the Airport Extreme is the only usb capable router that will mount mac drives and hence be able to use time machine?

 

[Unregistered]

Is it true that the Airport Extreme is the only usb capable router that will mount mac drives and hence be able to use time machine?

HFS+ filesystem does not have very good Linux support, so I would not expect it to be supported well in any other routers.

 

[daniellord]

CLARIFICATION: on Airport Extreme review

The authors said this:"For example, the Extreme lacks an SPI (stateful packet inspection) firewall and relies only on NAT for firewall protection. SPI firewalls allow outgoing packets, but only permit inbound packets if they are part of an established connection. While the importance of this feature may be debatable, it is curious that Apple omitted it, since pretty much every other consumer router sports a NAT+SPI firewall."

Well, if you knew more about the Mac, you would know why. The reason is every single Mac has a solid powerful firewall built-in thanks to OS X's UNIX roots: ipfw. Apple saw no reason to bog down their network router running a firewall when users can get more granularlity and flexibility tuning each Mac from the defaults if we desire. Also, CNET tested the APE and found it above average in speed so you might want to retest. The APE does have some missing features as you pointed out, but performance is not one of them. Time Machine and Mobile Me integration, Bonjour printer sharing, and Back To Your Mac support make it the single best choice if you use mainly use Macs. I have three and two extremes in my home/home office complex and they configure and perform better and more reliably than the Linksys products they replaced.

 

[zjohnr]

No (at least AFAIK)

Is it true that the Airport Extreme is the only usb capable router that will mount mac drives and hence be able to use time machine?

I would find that hard to believe. My understanding is that the router does not look at the actual disk content but merely relays the USB commands to access the external storage (or printer) across the local network.

In other words, the router shouldn't care how the drive is formatted or partitioned. Only the operating system on the computer trying to use the drive would care about that.

What could matter is if there is software support provided by the the router manufacturer to allow you to access the drive from a Mac.

Not directly related, but I've been backing up with Time Machine to a network attached IOCELL 351UNE. It's another alternative to attaching a drive via the USB port on a router. Here is a link to a thread talking about this NDAS device. The thread also contains a link back to the review on this site for this device.

There are bugs in the device driver (kernel extension) when using this device via 802.11 in Snow Leopard. For some reason the read speeds are extremely slow when using wireless with Snow Leopard. Writes seem to be ok though.

I've only seen this problem in Snow Leopard. If you're still using Leopard or using a wired ethernet connection you should have no problem.

-irrational john

 

[szc]

Latest AEBS firmware 7.5.1 fixes these problems?

Please take a look at this post in Apple Discussion Forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11185456#11185456

Firmware is not available for public yet (it looks like Apple may hide it just like they did with the last one).

Could it be that they also changed something when it comes to hardware? I mean, not just flushed these new replacement units with new firmware, but could it be they also tweaked something "inside"?