Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter.
Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn’t been publicly announced.
Apple hasn’t refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn’t currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s plans.
You can pry my 2013 AirPort Extreme from my cold, dead hands. After a long string of terrible routers, I have nothing but positive experiences with it, and have zero intention of replacing it with anything else.
I’ve always had good success with apple airports
Pretty good success with higher end asus routers
Also (other than the pita setup) cisco asa5505 and aeronet 1240ag setups were stable as all getout
but apple tended to always be stable also. sad to seethem go…
This is really too bad, as it shows a change in focus for Apple.
To what, I don’t know.
But one of the premises behind the airport was simply bringing the Apple experience of “just works” and “ease of use” to parts that empower the wireless lifestyle.
What good in a single button remote and interface on your Apple TV if you have to fight some arcane awful router to get the thing to work?
I guess they feel that wifi is ubiquitous enough now that they no longer need to enable it. Which is a shame.
The “it doesn’t make enough money” aspect of it is interesting as well.
I know Apple is always on a shoestring, stretching their limited resources thin, but still.
Oh well, as I said. Too bad.
Pathetic, not too long till all that will be left is that damn phone just before sales go pear shaped.
I think the phone is the next product apple will kill.
Once they figure out how to shrink that battery and cell radio into the watch size, it’s just watches and tablets.
What we now call a “phone” is nothing but a pocket tablet.
Of all my devices, I use it the least. It just follows me around and loans out it’s radio. It’s interface is only used for GPS, alerts, and email/scheduling.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. They’re the only sub-$300 routers that have ever been worth two craps. It runs for months upon months without a reset, which is more than I can say for any Linksys/Netgear/Asus/whatever I have ever owned in my life.
This is a sad, sad day for consumer routers, for sure. I want to fly to CA and beat Timmy-boy on the head with a Linksys. Too bad it would shatter.
I’ve had great success with and old TP-Link wireless router running OpenWrt. It’s been really stable and I get a good connection even in a highrise building where the local telco’s equipment just plain fails.
No thanks. I deal with routers, switches, etc all day at work. I ran OpenWRT and DD-WRT both and they ended up being nothing but a pain to keep running. That’s what I love about my Airport: I just set it and forget it. The last thing I want after dealing with this crap all day is to deal with it in the evenings as well.
No my experience. Maybe I got lucky, but this thing has been the most trouble free router I’ve ever had. I spent 15 minutes updating it once in a while, but in between that I barely even remember that it exists.
darknexus,
OpenWRT and DD-WRT are great for extending a router’s features, but it’s not going to make up for very constrained hardware. Many people try installing on cheap router (like the extremely cheap & popular linksys WRT54) many of which had only 16MB or even 8MB of ram, in which case I think their expectations for 3rd party firmware may have been too high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#WRT54G
They should be very reliable on better hardware provisioned with at least 32 or 64MB of ram, top end routers have much more. I was unable to find any technical specs on the airport (I find apple’s product page very disappointing in this regard), but just going by it’s ~$200 retail price, it’s competing with high end routers from other brands.
Edit: Granted there are many potential factors that go into making a router good, RAM is almost irrelevant as long as there’s enough of it
But running out of space was so common on low end routers that it was probably the main reason they had the reputation for being unreliable even though nothing else was technicaly wrong with them.
Edited 2016-11-22 02:20 UTC
If anyone needs a *stable* and easy to manage router, I can wholeheartedly recommend Synology one. Runs their firmware, receives frequent updates, and I haven’t had to reboot it for months even though it is connecting through 4G mobile USB stick which are crappy by themselves.
Ooh, now I’m interested. I didn’t realize Synology made routers. I have a Synology NAS, and absolutely love it. If their router firmware is of similar quality, I’m interested!
It actually runs a variant of SRM you are already familiar with, along with many of NAS features. Personally I don’t have any of their NAS boxes, but a friend who does suggested I get their router when I was asking around for something reliable and I couldn’t be happier. They have only one router model so you will find it easily….supposedly an updated version should be out soon but this one does everything I need.
I found it. Specs look pretty nice. Smallnetbuilder doesn’t seem too happy with it, but they always hated the Airport too so I’m not inclined to take their experience at face value. If Synology still has routers when my Airport dies (which could be a very long while) I’ll probably look there first.
Yeah, just read the review. Wireless performance was not my concern. Robustness and stability is, and it is an absolute winner there.
I’ve never had a problem with TP-Link routers and wireless cards/dongles (they are probably the cheapest devices on the market).
Edited 2016-11-23 09:39 UTC
I’ve always used wired connections. I’ve got gigabit routers tied with cat6 cable anywhere important in the house.
Which do require, unless you’re from a parallel universe, a router. So your point is?
I never understood why routers freeze or suddenly stop communicating with wifi adapters in the middle of a download (or Skype session). Isn’t 802.11 supposed to be a standard, and isn’t “WiFi certified” supposed to be the certification procedure for that standard? There shouldn’t be any dark spots on certified devices!
But of course, when you try to make a warranty claim, both tech support teams will tell you it is the other device’s fault…
Edited 2016-11-21 18:43 UTC
Er? Perhaps the shitty software these routers use has well… memory leaks?
I have to reboot my router once a month otherwise it slows to a crawl and eventually stops routing.
One of thse days, I’ll get around to getting a decent one but until then it is a 1st of the month reboot.
It could also be cooling issues. Asus, in particular, doesn’t give a crap about cooling and consequently their supposed top of the line routers will heat themselves to a crawl every few days. If you have one of these, you’d better have a fan you can point at it.
kurkosdr,
More often than not, on older hardware, I’ve found the problem is simply that the dynamic NAT redirection tables overflow and new connections fail until the existing ones time out. P2P workloads would be especially vulnerable because they open up so many connections.
If you have access to the router’s serial console, you can often predict exactly when the problem will occur by watching the NAT tables fill up. I’ve seen some routers set to expire connections after 24hours of inactivity, which means new connections may be blocked by very old abandoned connections still in the NAT tables. What makes it infuriating is that there’s no external indication that this is happening and the router/internet just appears to drop packets, even the admin page is unresponsive.
Rebooting clears it up, and so does waiting several hours for the historic NAT entries to time out, not that either of these are acceptable.
The cheap linksys and netgear routers from around 2010 had this problem, but I’d hope that this has been resolved in all new models on the market today since even the cheaper models have no excuse for being so memory constrained today.
That’s a real shame. I have 2 2013 AirPort Extremes in my house and they just work. Using one of them together with a USB drive for my Time Machine Backups. I should probably buy a spare before they disappear
https://www.ubnt.com/
Edge Router Lite and Unifi AP. Haven’t touched, rebooted or similar.. in a year or more…
I can second this. I have an ER-X at home with 2 Unifi AP’s. At work, we have these in our locations across the country. Good layer-3 provisioning, and VERY reliable. The only time I have to touch the equipment is when I’m upgrading.
I’ll have to check these out. I’d not heard of them before. Having both a router and an AP is probably more than most home users want to deal with however, so probably not a competitor to the Airport routers in that sense. It does look intriguing, however, for those of us who don’t mind a little wiring work.
This is what Ubiquiti is pushing to the home market;
https://www.amplifi.com/
Heard good things – easy setup, reliable, decent app, has a web interface to fallback on unlike Apple’s AirPort-Utility-or-bust method, company has a decent security and support record. A bit on the expensive side though.
I’m quite happy with my current Linksys WRT1900ac + DD-WRT setup, but Ubiquiti is where I’d look if I was an AirPort fan (with first-world income) and wanted an alternative “everyman” sort of interface.
Edited 2016-11-21 20:47 UTC
It’s stability that’s of prime importance to me, not price. It needs to go for months without reset or other maintenance, and needs to last more than a year. That latter point, especially, is where most of the consumer routers really fail.
I dunno. My previous cheap-ass TP-Link running OpenWRT ran without any issue whatsoever for 4+ years, and would still be running fine today if I hadn’t replaced it with the Linksys (I wanted wireless ac). Only times I had to “fiddle” with it was 15-20 minutes once every 4 months or so upgrading via SSH to a new OpenWRT version. Looking at the non-existent security roadmap most OEM router companies offer, setting aside that small amount of time every quarter wasn’t that much of a sacrifice. Heck, Apple’s iOS and OSX/macOS transition upgrades gave me more headaches than any DD/OpenWRT upgrade ever did in that time period.
In contrast, the AirPort/TimeCapsule thing in my aunt’s house can’t give a stable signal anywhere above the ground floor it’s placed in, and that’s something no amount of proprietary Airport Utility has been able to fix for the past two years.
Apparently, the time capsules were another story. I don’t know if they just weren’t shielded and the hdd messed up the signal, or what. Everyone says the tc signals are terrible. I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never used one. The Extreme though (router only) has always been rock solid stable for me, and I never felt that a router should double as a limited NAS anyway.
Was interested in them as well.
However the two “wireless super mesh points” do not have an Ethernet port, which in my case I would need.
Netgear’s Orbi and Luma Home have Ethernet ports on their WiFi points. Way more flexible…
Edited 2016-11-21 21:11 UTC
Good riddance. Another product Apple did a half-assed job maintaining.
I don’t use a standalone router outside of just passing traffic to a firewalled box that then acts as my router. People should stop using the crap and just slap a Raspberry Pi in between their modem and their internal network. Granted, they would still have to jave a modem that doesn’t overheat.
Explain that to home users. Honestly, people like you have zero perspective on the world outside of geekdom.
leech,
It’s not for most, but for people willing to do a little DIY setup, you can actually build a very nice router out of a mini-pc for a similar price to high end routers.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DIY-Mini-PC-Industrial-Control-Celeron-J190…
Many of these boxes are made for pfsense software, but they’re just commodity hardware that you can run anything on.
When it came time to buy a new router, I really considered a store bought router, but what always happens is that I end up running a computer full time behind the router because the router isn’t as capable as what I needed. So this time I decided to build my own router and throw my own Linux distro on it. It’s been fast & solid. I can segment my network exactly how I want it. I serve up webpages and run processes that monitor everything in my network. I can even run wireshark on it, which is a huge bonus over a normal router. The biggest perk is that I no longer have to rely on another physical machine on the network for anything. I can manage my whole network over an SSH tunnel. I can even run virtual machines on it.
Anyone who feels constrained by off the shelf routers should consider a minipc, however it’s not something I’d recommend for the inexperienced.
that comes with the ISPs cable modem. I use an ZyXEL EMG2926-Q10A (99$ CAD). And I have no WIFI problem reaching everywhere needed. Even in the living room with the massive WIFI blackhole interference.
Most people I know who have “router problems” actually have ISP problems.
I wonder if the Mac Mini will suffer the same fate.
Edited 2016-11-21 21:53 UTC
I guess I’ve been lucky. In the mid 90s, I purchased a Linksys single port, wired router to go with my cable modem. I replaced it in 2011 with the newly introduced Linksys WRT45GL, which was really the old style 54G before Linksys had wrecked it. I flashed the 54GL with Tomato, added a bit in the router ad blocking, and turned it loose.
It reboots when there is a power failure. Otherwise, total stability. When people speak reverently of their trouble free routers, I know what they mean. I don’t need the range or speed of N, or A-C. I like reliability. Amazon still sells this thing new. If they still do when this one goes, I’ll get another one.
It’d be nice, except it’s wireless G. I know what you mean though. I had an original WRT54G back in 2004. That thing ran for four years. Unfortunately, given the things I need to do, wireless G is not practical now. If they had an equivalent N or AC, then hell yes. They don’t, however, and Linksys’ newer routers seem to be complete crap in my experience.
I think i’ve owned 3 in 20 years or however long it’s been.
Problems with cable/ISDN modem in that time: probably 100x
Problems with Apple routers in that time: 0
The 1st one was retired for being too slow. The 2nd one is still going strong. The 3rd is a repeater/express and that’s working fine too.
I’ve been working from home for decades and push tons of data through them 24/7/265. I think they are good products. It has been 6 years since I had a config problem, and even then it was just buried in a control panel, not a real problem.
I suppose apple feels enough of the confusion and configuration has been worked out and they no longer need to be in this space for their customers. Apple only offers a product in a space if a) their customers require it for basic satisfaction, and b) they can make some money off it.
The phone is the next product apple kills. Right now it’s the cash cow but not forever.
The phone is the least useful device in the Apple lineup of phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and set-top boxes. It’s just the first, and is the cell radio for most of us, so we rely on it.
As soon as Apple shrinks that battery and cell radio into the watch form, I think they kill the iPhone as a concept. It’s just a small tablet.
Where you pay for your cell radio is up to you – all the apple devices can share it now.
You read it here first (?) — Apple will ride that iPhone out to version 10 or so but then it’s done. It’s just a pocket-sized tablet. No point in separating ipad/iphone for much longer. They are the same with different screen sizes, almost everything else is the same, just minor differences when developing for them.
I said in 2013 that Apple will kill the 3.5mm mini-jack. It’s part of their pattern. I saw the coming end of optical discs, floppy discs (who cares), and firewire (no! keep it!). Apple reassess the ‘norm’ all the time and makes their hay changing/improving it. They can look forward in a practical manner better than most tech companies.
Is the iPod dead yet? Or the Mac Mini? Mac Pro? The iPhone is more profitable than all of those put together, and the Apple Watch has already dropped in sales.
True, however I do suspect we’d see some change if the watch could, you know, actually do anything on its own. If it was the phone, I know I at least would actually look seriously at it. As it is right now, it’s a toy that’s dependent on your phone, so of very limited use. If I could swap, completely swap, my pocket phone for a watch and lose nothing save screen size in the process, I would do it.
Nah, “largest screen you can conveniently carry” is a useful niche. You don’t want to drag an ipad everywhere, but equally much you don’t want to read or view (or write) much of anything on a tiny watch screen. Both the watch and the ipad are strictly worse at both the things Apple focuses on when selling phones and the things people actually use them for.
Edited 2016-11-24 12:20 UTC
In the US, it’s common for a wifi router to come with whatever internet you get – essentially for free (even if they charge you for it, it’s too much work for most to get that charge dropped, so they just pay it). This probably makes selling end user routers pretty challenging, and certainly very niche. It’s a shame though because the router you get from your cable or phone company is without variation, completely horrible.
Not only that, but if you’re with certain ISPs (comcast), the default is to let other people use your router even if you have a password set. So long as they are Comcast customers as well, they can leech your bandwidth. Opting out is possible, however they can turn it back on whenever they wish. So not only is your provided router utter crap, but it may be letting other people into your network as well that you did not want there.
Same is true in UK