Filed under: Hardware, Airport
Engadget gets hands on with Apple's new AirPort Extreme
While I still need to drop $180 to get an AirPort Extreme Base Station for 'review' from Apple, Engadget just put theirs through its paces. Overall, they found that the obvious upsides were Apple's sleek design and easy-breezy setup thanks to the revamped AirPort Admin Utility 5.0. In the drawbacks category, however, were a bizarre lack - in fact a back-step for the AirPort base station - of gigabit ethernet, and less-than-optimal transfer rates, though Engadget concedes your mileage may vary, as it so often does with wireless hardware.
Engadget has also posted a hands-on gallery, which includes their own screenshots of the new Admin Utility. Strangely, they didn't say anything about some of this base station's new found abilities, such as the new AirPort Disk, one of the key features making me count my pennies in anticipation of affording one of these.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jonozo said 6:17PM on 2-15-2007
I just set up my Airport Extreme last weekend and an interesting fact not publicised is that you can hardwire the Airport Extreme to an Airport Express and "transfer" the AirTunes function and USB-printer access to the Airport Extreme (leaving the USB port on the Extreme free for a hard drive!). Whether or not you keep the Airport Express up and running as a separate wireless access point is up to you. I did and kept the Extreme as the 5Ghz wireless-N network and the Express as the 2.4Ghz wireless-G network for guests. The Express get its IP address from the Extreme. All of this is done by setting up both Airports as separate networks and connecting the Express to one of the ethernet ports on the Extreme. Then you select the option for the Express to pass the printer and AirTunes to the Extreme in the Airport utility. It's better than buying a hub for an extra USB port and you get AirTunes (something I was not prepared to live without!)
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Victor Agreda, Jr. said 5:15PM on 2-15-2007
make no mistake, that AirPort disk thing is going to be a VERY useful when Time Machine comes around. for those of us on 'Books anyway...
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VR said 6:01PM on 2-15-2007
It does not allow you to "stealth" your ports, and it leaves port 53 open no matter what you do.
Unacceptable in my opinion.
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Chris said 7:24PM on 2-15-2007
I work at a school and we just got one of these set up this week. While it does look great, there are two things that we found very annoying:
One - no wall mount. We currently mount all our airports up high on the wall to prevent people from just walking off with them (there are cable locked too, FYI), but this doesn't allow that option. Currently, I haven't been able to find a wall mount - take note accessory companies - so we have to put on top a high bookshelf and cable lock it to that.
Second - no ability to import access control entries. I know this isn't the most secure way of keeping people off your airports (I'm working my boss on better ways...) but all our older units use the ACLs to prevent unauthorized computers from using the wireless. These new units only allow you to put in ACLs one listing at a time, which would take forever with the 300 laptops we have on campus.
The new Airport Utility is very nice. The only trouble we had with it was right at first, when we had to discover that you double click on a unit to get to the settings. If you just click once, it starts the setup wizard again.
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Geoffrey said 8:09PM on 2-15-2007
I bought one last week and had issues using the idisk. I have both PC's and Macs and both of them had issues with the attached disk coming and going on the network. Half the time when I tried to access my disk attached to the AE using my Macbook, it would kick me off the network (wireless) and not let me back on until I restarted the router. Ultimately it was too unstable (even with the macs) to warrant the $180. Maybe in a couple firmware updates I will give it another shot. It was damn pretty.
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Dan Frakes said 9:22PM on 2-15-2007
"Currently, I haven't been able to find a wall mount - take note accessory companies - so we have to put on top a high bookshelf and cable lock it to that."
Chris: The reason there isn't a wall mount is that the new Base Stations use an array of three antennas optimized for horizontal orientation. According to Apple, if you were to place a new Base Station flat against a wall, you'd see significantly reduced performance.
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Robert said 3:49AM on 2-16-2007
Lets call it a ceiling mount then... ;-)
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Christopher L. Williams said 8:40AM on 2-16-2007
I won't even consider one until Apple makes MAC address cloning or spoofing a feature on the AE. My ISP authenticates via MAC address, and is a must-have facet for me. I'm nt sure why Apple hasn't implemented it yet. It's in every other router on the planet.
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Bruce Greiner said 7:41PM on 2-16-2007
I install my extreme last night. Had the PS-3, the PSP, Air Port express, my MacPro and the Dell XP hooked up in 15 minutes and all pinging the internet via cable modem like there was not tomorrow. The first thing I notice was that the dropps I had experienced due to wireless 2.4 gHz everything in the house disappeared. Played WOW for several howers and not an issues. Also made sure that Parallel worked successfully. I am not sure how they do it but I continued to be amazed that Apple can make something like this a no-brainer.
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Nick said 12:00AM on 2-17-2007
I got mine tonight and it is absolutely amazing. I replaced a Belkin that had really terrible reception throughout the house. Now my network works perfect.
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Bret Benziger said 1:37AM on 3-13-2007
I got one set up and it works great, except the disk feature does not work with thumb drives. Also when adding my printer I get nothing but obscure error messages.
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