New Airport Extreme

Apple has released a successor to its very popular line of Base Stations the new Airport Extreme. This is everything you would want in a main router for the house. It has a very friendly configuration interface that makes it easy to setup and maintain your home network. We have been using the previous model in our house for over a year now and it has served us well, from having top notch security to making it easy to keeping our wireless devices connected. The wireless strength has been great even in our hold home which normally defeated all of our attempts to introduce a wireless network. With this new model Apple has stepped up to the plate and has seen the oncoming onslaught of HD and streaming HD so they have introduced the draft standard of 802.11n. This mammoth speed boost from what we all thought was super fast 802.11g is amazing. Basically we are talking somewhere in the range of 100-200Mbps!! Even on the low end that is some insane speed for your wireless network.

You may ask, well why do I need so much speed, I'm getting along fine with my g router, I don't want to upgrade. Well if you plan on streaming any HD content over your wireless network to that nice new big HDTV you just bought you might find that the g standard just won't cut it, and forget about it if anyone else is in the house and using the same network for anything.
Apple has a plan and that plan involves HD content streamed to the Apple TV and displayed on a HDTV. There can be no other reason why they moved to the n standard so long before it is finalized.

Well we couldn't be happier, now one of our major concerns about all the streaming that we do and will be doing in the future has been removed. We quickly saw that our 54Mb bandwidth would have been slowly chipped away and brought to its knees with music, photos and HD content flying all over the place.
So for using the n standard they have already won us over, but they didn't stop there! Almost as if they were reading our minds they have added functionality to the USB port on the back. On the older models this was simply a print server, but on this new model it doubles as a print server and Network Attached Storage! What a genius idea that is really going to help out all the people just getting into streaming media.
No need to have a computer running or having to worry about setting up some kind of file sharing system, Apple has done it for you. And by allowing you to hook up a USB hub to its USB port your can attach as many drives as you would like. In our minds they have removed two major barriers for people wanting to enter this world.
People like things simple, in years past we would hack together all kinds of solutions with a bunch of different devices and many late nights on Google trying to make our home network robust and our storage seamless. It took a lot of patience a fair bit of know how to get everything to work properly. Well Apple has taken care of all that with this new Base Station.

We will be getting one next month so stay tuned for our full hands on review. We'll see how easy the NAS is to setup and what kind of transfer rates it can achieve. Check back for all the goodies. We leave you with our obligatory pros and cons section:

Pros:

Uses the 802.11 draft n standard
Small form factor so you can tuck it away or mount it flush up against the wall
Has the ability to be used as Network Attached Storage
Built in print server
Can operate in the 5GHz spectrum which should reduce interference from all of those other wireless household appliances that are everywhere
Backward compatible with older wireless standards a,b,g

Cons:

Only has support for 10/100Mbs Lan ports, we would have liked to have seen 1000Mbs thrown in there
Configuration software for windows leaves something to be desired
Umm...it doesn't make me breakfast??( honesty those are all the cons we could think of

For sale March 1st! Grab one at Amazon.

February 28, 2007

New Airport Extreme