Ars Technica reviews the new AirPort Extreme Base Station

@Eli ". Is the lack of QoS on Apple routers a huge disappointment to anyone else?"

Absolutely...that and the lack of Gigabit.

Thanks anyway, saved me from reading the review to find out that it doesn't have QoS support.

I've had mine for about a week. It's excellent (and heavy) in every way, with one exception. I too am having issues with Airport Disk. Oddly, it seems to be dropping the disk(s) less often now than it did in the beginning. No explanation there.

I have to say that GigaBit, while not a deal-breaker for me, would have been splendid. I have a bunch of Macs, but not all of them are Core 2 Duo machines (I did order an N card for my CD MB, however). GigaBit would have allowed me to directly connect my non-N Macs and run the wireless at pure N.

I bought one about a week ago and am very disappointed. it crashes a lot. It doesnt work with the brand new HP printer i bought from the Apple Store and the Airport Disk never works consistently. I wish i had stayed wtih my old Linksys router. I hooked up a USB hub to attach two hard drives but it only seems to recognize a single drive. Very disappointing overall.

Hi Cody. I'll probably end up using a hub, but that's just one more item to plug in to an already crowded outlet. It just seems like they could have added a second one for convenience. Long term I'm building/getting a NAS solution, so the USB won't be an issue, but it still seems a little odd.

Galley, you're generally right about the multifunction device, though I've heard there are some printer servers that allow two way communication with the multi function device. Not the airport though (that I know of). Fortunately I'm just hooking up my cheap B&W laser printer, not our copier/scanner thing.

From what I have read you cannot access scanners, whether they are stand-alone or part of a multi-function device.

Kris - You can use an external hard disk and printer at the same time through the use of a USB hub.

One question I have is can you use the scanning and copying abilities of a Multi-Function printer over the Airport Extreme. I know with the Airport Express you can't (or only with some printers).

I really like the admin feature. At first I was iffy about not having a web interface, but I've grown to like it. The first few days with this router were a nightmare though. I would have connection for a few minutes, then it would drop. I'd still see a wireless connection, but I wouldn't be assigned an IP address. This happened on every computer - 2 macs, 2 PCs, all 802.11g. (no N yet, but I'll be upgrading gradually). Eventually I found a discussion talking about the auto channels. By setting the channel manually rather than letting it choose, my connection stabilized. Now that I can actually evaluate it, it seems to be a stronger wireless signal that the linksys router it replaced. A couple things:
* Why they would have a USB print server and a USB disk option... but only have one USB port is a little odd
* Why you have to reboot whenever you make a change to the system is annoying.
* Why, when my cable went out, my home network also went down... and stayed down until Cable came back

Overall, I'm not unhappy with the airport - I just expected more out of Apple.

The Airport Disk function is a mess. I've tried multiple drives and format options and cannot get it working reliably. And when it crashes the base station, it takes the rest of the wireless network with it.
The drives likes to disappear when a Mac logs into it and sometimes it will also lock up the base station so hard that you need to do a firmware reset on it.
NOT ready for primetime. See the Apple support discussion boards for many examples.

Lack of GigaBit ethernet is a dealbreaker.

Our house is wired and has 4 different Linksys boxes to do the work I could get done with 2 of these Airport Extremes orone AE & a GigE switch.

It could serve iTunes and apple TV if you configured iTunes to store some or all of your library on a disk connected to it. For Apple TV, assuming it works like FrontRow, you could get non-iTunes stuff to work by way of aliasing the appropriate aiport disk to your movies folder. I assume.

Whilst the lack of Gigabit ethernet is a tad disappointing and a little puzzling, it doesn't bother me too much since I plan to use one for an extra backup. I currently have a full backup of my main machine via a firewire disk but as a result of a recent failure to both my main drive and my backup, I plan to run an incremental backup wirelessly and also store files I often need to access from multiple machines.