Linksys Announces New Velop and Gaming Router

[thiggins]

Linksys' CES 2018 announcements include a cheaper Velop and new gaming router

Read on SmallNetBuilder

 

[Mokers]

Interesting that Apple is now selling the Velop. I wonder if that means the end of Airport.

 

[RMerlin]

I wonder if that means the end of Airport.

I thought they had officially discontinued the Airport last year.

 

[Mokers]

I thought they had officially discontinued the Airport last year.

They said they were not going to be developing it further, but they are still selling the APs themselves.

 

[sfx2000]

They said they were not going to be developing it further, but they are still selling the APs themselves.

Actually they did not say they were stopping development of Airports. There were rumors of the Airport team being assigned to other projects - and that's reasonable - should note they did push out a recent release for the Airport N and AC class devices within the past few weeks - which means developers at Apple are still looking at Airports.

Airports were ahead of the game for some time - the "mesh" stuff - Airport had that years ago with Extended Networks (including Guest Network Support) - the Extreme AC's are still good AC1900 class devices based on the same HW as the Asus RT-AC68U and Netgear R7000 - older devices from Asus and Netgear, but these are still very relevant, as is the Airport AC's are...

 

[Mokers]

Airports are very good and I owned several and used the extend network feature. Yes Apple has kept it upgraded and fixed KRACK, but I dont think it is out of line to speculate when they would stop selling it. I'm sure they would do a good job of they pursued it further but it looks like they want a smart speaker first now. Committing to selling linksys in retail stores adds complexity (admittedly slight) to their supply chain. And we've been seeing this for a while now for several products. I thought Apple's cinema display was still pretty good but Apple has blessed LG for displays now.

 

[sfx2000]

Committing to selling linksys in retail stores adds complexity (admittedly slight) to their supply chain. And we've been seeing this for a while now for several products. I thought Apple's cinema display was still pretty good but Apple has blessed LG for displays now.

they're sold other vendors in the online store as well - even for WiFi...

At the end of the day - the Airports do well enough for Apple's product line - it would be nice to see a refresh on that product line, but for now, not much need.