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Apple’s Done Making Airport Routers, So Try These Instead

Author: Brian Barrett / Source: WIRED

Close observers of Apple’s networking products—surely they exist—know that the company hasn’t updated its Airport line of Wi-Fi routers since 2013. That’s so many iPhones ago! This week, the company made it official: It will no longer churn out Airport Express, Extreme, or Time Capsule routers.

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Rather than mourn the end of an era, take the chance to give your home Wi-Fi a boost with one of these newer, better alternatives.

Even if the official end of the Airport era was a long time coming, it’s still a shame. Apple’s routers may not have had as many features or as much horsepower their peers, but you didn’t have to think twice about them and they looked nice, at a time when most other options caused near-constant hassles and mostly resembled alien robot spiders. Time Capsule, especially, provided one-stop, no-muss backup for people who didn’t want to fiddle with external hard drives. Like so many Apple products, they were imperfect and expensive, but they were also reliable, and they did about as much as most people needed them to.

The good news is that over the last few years a new wave of so-called mesh network systems, which deploy multiple units throughout your home for can’t-miss coverage, have caught up to Apple in design and far surpassed it in functionality and coverage. It’s a complete enough walloping that Apple even sells a pricey Linksys mesh networking system in retail stores, alongside the few Airport Expresses and Extremes that it hasn’t yet cleared out of its warehouses.

And really, it’s been five years since Apple paid any attention to its routers. At this point, much any decent model you pick up will be an improvement. If you want to know what basic features to look for, Apple now even provides a handy list: support for the IEEE 802.11ac standard, simultaneous dual-band coverage, WPA2 encryption, and MIMO, which stands for multiple input, multiple output, a performance booster when you connect multiple devices. (The one thing you’ll have a harder time replacing: Time Capsule’s backups. You should probably just to get an external hard drive.)

Those features have come mostly standard in routers in the Airport price range for years. What you really want is something with a little style, a lot of coverage, and an interface that doesn’t leave you catatonic. Something like one of these.