Apple has officially ended development on its AirPort line of products, which includes the AirPort Express ($99), the AirPort Extreme ($199), and the AirPort Time Capsule ($299).
This makes me sad. I have the latest AirPort Extreme, and it’s one of those products I have absolutely zero complaints about. It’s easy to use, works like a charm, has far better performance than any other router I’ve ever had, and looks unassuming. If it ever fails. I’ll probably take a look at something like Eero.
Most ISP’s are providing their own wireless modem routers, most people wont bother buying anything else. It’s a shame.
I keep reading this as an argument. While it is true, but most of the ISP router are completely shit. And the have Zero incentive to improve the range, performance and ease of use.
Unless some one do something about it, we have a future with crapy router and modem along with shitty wireless performance.
There are already plenty of good routers and AP’s out there.. The future is centrally managed cloud based full solutions for routers, wifi and switches (at least in the low-end networking space where Apple was competing).
On the router side of things, even Ubiquiti is starting to get into proper IPS for their routers for low end. For high end, brands like Watchguard and Palo Alto literally detect unknown Ransomware and viruses using sandboxes.
For Wifi, ubiquiti has pretty much has dominated the lower end market for a while now. For high end, brands like Aruba/HPE have WIPS and 802.11ac Wave 2.
The other problem with the Airports primarily is the software they use. Yes its easy to use, but its archaic and is generations behind everything else.
Also, Apple’s QA has been fairly horrible for a very long time now, and its catching up with them (the whole “windows is buggy, insecure and crashes a lot” message is no longer effective since Steve died). Its not because Steve Jobs managed development QA better, but rather that many people religiously believed Steve Jobs.
That means they GENUINELY need to fix their product lineup again, and that means dropping products.
Edited 2018-04-27 08:37 UTC
Auzy,
“cloud based full solutions for routers”… no thank you!
“The cloud” is a euphemism for giving other corporations control over our hardware and data, this isn’t the way things should work; cloud solutions are proprietary, restrictive, and can close down at any time.
Instead, I’d rather see more support for SNMP. Having a standard API to administer all of our network devices in a consistent fashion is achievable, this is what SNMP was envisioned to be. When it’s actually supported it is awesome; SNMP devices are trivial to program into scripts and integrate together. The problem is that most consumer products don’t have SNMP support.
For some time now I’ve been looking for PTZ network security cameras. I finally caved and bought some hikvision PTZ network security cameras. These are just awful: they’re proprietary, locked down, IE + active x pieces of garbage. They connect to servers in china. Remote exploits have been found. I seriously wanted to avoid all these known problems, but all the major products I found are either hikvision or dahua (which are sold under a plethora of brand names in the US).
Many consumers have been complaining about the active-x components for years. After all these years it hasn’t been fixed and the video streaming doesn’t work in chrome, firefox, or even in microsoft’s current edge browser. The official vendor solution…a damned browser extension to load the IE browser within firefox tabs:
https://www.worldeyecam.com/howto/how-to-access-your-dvr-with-mozill…
Just unacceptable.
I hated giving hikvision/dahua my money, it goes against everything I stand for, but my attempts to find a network camera sporting an HTML5 based interface and non-proprietary firmware were in vein. I’m going to block the “cloud” functionality of these cameras at the firewall and access them through a local DVR instead. I just can’t stand how we’re getting roped into these unwanted cloud services and proprietary products. Enough is enough damn it! I want to have control over my own equipment.
All I want is a finished user product that isn’t proprietary and supports current web standards. Does anyone make that?
/off topic rant
Edited 2018-04-27 14:14 UTC
If you are able and can manage your data locally, you are free to do so.
The thing is that 99.9% of the technology market is no longer computer nerds, but rather plain consumers that view it as just another appliance/service.
Computing has been comoditized for a while, and those market forces are so massive compared to the old nerdy driven demand that there’s no way that genie is going back into the bottle.
So yeah, cloud is here to stay, because the average consumer doesn’t give a shit because it’s still a black box to them regardless of whether the location of that box is local or remote.
tylerdurden,
So in the case of network security cameras, the posts show that average users DO “give a shit”, but like me, they don’t have much choice. It would be more accurate to say that it is the manufactures that don’t give a shit, especially since customers have been complaining about it for so many years.
Edited 2018-04-27 17:12 UTC
You can pick whatever forum posts you want to further your confirmation bias.
It has nothing to do with local vs remote, but rather quality of service. The vast majority of customers don’t give a shit where the “magic” is located, as long as the magic works.
There were shitty “local” products back then, and there are shitty “cloud” products right now. But what the customer sees is a black box, if it’s shitty, they will go to another provider, or the vendor (unless it is already a monopoly) will go under as the product’s image becomes toxic. But the customer will not make a decision based on whether things are local, or using open standards, or what have you. That’s what us geeks care about, but we’re like 1% of the consumer market now.
Consumers care that the product/service works, whatever has to happen for that to happen for the average consumer are irrelevant details. Look at any other market; e.g. the vast majority of car buyers couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the physics behind the combustion engine.
tylerdurden,
Ok, but they do care about things like noise, efficiency, emissions, power, etc. We should not use the argument that “buyers couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the physics” to suggest that the physics of a combustion engine don’t matter. The physics DO matter even if the buyers don’t understand how or why. Likewise with PTZ cameras: consumers may not understand active-x plugins versus HTML5, but it does not mean they aren’t negatively affected by the manufacturer’s poor engineering choices.
Incidentally, I was sufficiently bothered by the lack of openness that I tried to build my own PTZ camera from parts:
https://imgur.com/miYtppz
They work via arduinos, but alas my manufacturing skills aren’t the best and they were too fragile for the outdoor setting I wanted to use them in.
Edited 2018-04-28 08:45 UTC
We install AV, Networking, security and Home automation for a living. We agree that things aren’t ideal with network cameras at the moment. ActiveX is only half the problem. But the good news is, things are much better now than they were 5 years ago with ONVIF and a lot of auto provisioning through the DVR. As of late, most also now have standard applications available (Dahua has SmartPSS for instance, and it even seems to run in Wine somewhat). But this isn’t really anything to do with this discussion. Many network cams have SIGNIFICANTLY more serious issues at the moment (like the vendors promoting wireless cams which are vulnerable to jamming and vendors like Dahua/hikvision who suck at firmware upgrades).
Auzy,
I know, buying cameras fully knowing how broken and exploitable they are is extremely frustrating. The firmware situation is terrible. Obviously you and I would would be the first in line to ditch these guys if only there were more choices.
Edited 2018-04-28 15:24 UTC
In one old /. discussion I had an idea that we should rather call it “fog”…
Hm, and BTW: my buddy bought ~5 years ago a security IP camera to his shop, and IIRC it’s quite open, he accessed the stream from Linux…
Yeah, that’s not the case anymore. The ISP routers provided are pretty decent in the USA. It sucks in that they rent them for a monthly fee, but they also take care of software updates. Honestly, after years of rolling my own tomato router, I’m just sticking to the provided ones that just work ( running all traffic through my own VPN and DNS of course).
Yeah, but they’re crap. Most of the ISP-provided ones can’t even reach the far end of my upstairs which, I might add, my Airport Extreme has no problem doing. Plus, there’s all the underhanded hotspot crap that a lot of ISPs here are doing if you use their routers. My Airport is still going strong. I haven’t decided yet what I’ll do for a really high-performing, stable, unified solution (I don’t want to wire up several APs in the house) when my Airport is gone.
That said, I’m surprised to see this posted now. I was under the impression they’d officially announced this several months ago, and OSNews even had an article about it then.
I wonder now what the average user will do about Time Machine backups for their own home Macs? Me personally, I have a nice Synology NAS which accomplishes the task handily while also acting as a central media storage hub, but I’d hardly think the average home user would be able to set that up and it’s rather high on the price tag for most.
Right, the average home really needs some sort of expensive mesh’ solution, I think not.
A cheap UniFi AP, or similar, should be more than enough for most everyone. Which is kinda why Apple are getting out of the market.
Say this having an old express but if/when I upgrade my wi-fi it wouldn’t have been with Apple gear anyway.
Edited 2018-04-27 09:03 UTC
For the past 4-5 years, Apple has blatantly and quite obviously neglected, forgotten about, or just plain ignored a good chunk of their product line. Products like the iMac, Macbook, and mini have languished with ancient internals and no design changes at all. The new iPad they just released comes with the exact same display that my now-ancient 2012 iPad Air has in it! The only differences between the two are a newer processor (a past year’s model) and Pencil support.
What have they been doing during this time period? Building the new spaceship headquarters, that’s what. The coincidence of these two things just cannot be accidental. I think that Apple pretty much shut down nearly all product advancement 4 years ago to focus on the new building and getting themselves moved into it, and once that is complete, we will begin to see new and revised-at-last products. At least that is my hope. Going to my local Apple store and seeing nothing but products like the Mac Mini that has not been updated a bit in 4 years yet is still being sold for the same price is just sad.
Edited 2018-04-27 10:13 UTC
It’s worse than that. Some product refreshes went backwards. The 2012 Mac mini is twice as fast as the 2014 mac mini. Losing two cores and going to an ultrabook chip was a big mistake. Then they’ve sat on it. If you’re a mac mini owner, you need to sit on a 2012 forever. I gave up and bought an iMac a few months ago. It’s not terrible, but I miss hyperthreading. The GPU is obviously better.
Tim cook only cares about facebook machines. Any enhancements past what is needed for facebook are flat out. More ram, disk options.. not needed for facebook. More CPU? give them an ultrabook chip.
I have a 1st gen Airport base station, with an external drive attached. I’ve never had any issues with it. Works like a champ and only issue I have is when my cable company connection goes on the fritz…but, my Airport keeps on working.
wonderful routers… discontinuing them it’s a crying shame.
Nowadays if some product doesn’t make 10x of profit Apple doesn’t care about it… IMHO these small products and details made Apple great. Airport was a pretty innovative product back in the day.
But hey, maybe Apple re-release them in the future painted with gold at $1200… that’s “innovation” according to Tim Cook.
Random Linux/BSD-based NASes using netatalk _sort of_ work with Time Machine backups, but seem to be pretty error prone.
I just started trying to replace my old Time Capsule base station with an ASUS RT-AC88U which advertises Time Machine support; with an external drive attached I was able to back up easily, but *could not restore the backup sucessfully* even the very next day, never mind after months or years of usage.
If Time Machine’s AFP magic isn’t documented and isn’t safe on netatalk, what other choices do I have?
* maintain a spare Mac as a server
* physically attach the USB drive to my and my wife’s machines every day like clockwork, babysitting the backup and ejecting manually.
Neither is a great option.
Apple really needs to provide a good wifi/ethernet-attached NAS of their own to replace the Time Capsule base station — leave out the access point features and just concentrate on local storage and backup.
I tried the netatalk route a few years ago. I had to recompile netatalk for each update of Linux as something always broke it. Furthermore, you had to create the Time Machine containers manually on the remote server and they were not self expanding so you had to judge maximum space needed from the outset.
I gave up and hackintoshed instead. It was easier.