Most Apple products strike me as well-designed. The Apple wireless router — my Airport Extreme — isn’t one of them.
Ages ago, weary of constantly wrestling with mysterious settings and unexplained drop-outs, we switched from an aging Netgear router to the Apple Airport Extreme. Frankly? It never did strike me as a particularly great router, and it never did work as reliably or as well as I would have liked.
After moving to our new condo in Atlanta, the problems only got worse. For several days, the router wouldn’t work at all with my new MacBook laptop. Once we did coax some performance out of it, we still had problems: the amber error light on the front of the Airport Extreme would blink constantly, and every time I reset my MacBook, the Airport Extreme utility would spout dire warnings about duplicate addresses (???). Any attempt to correct these problems just made things worse — so we decided to live with them.
And then, Apple sent us an “upgrade” for our router’s firmware … and after that, it never worked again. After installing the upgrade, my MacBook could no longer see our AppleTV … and my wireless download speeds dropped to 50k (for the non-technical folks, that’s incredibly, unbelievably slow).
After hours spend fiddling, we finally yanked the darn Apple Airport Extreme out of the wall socket and plugged in an old Netgear router left over from our Video Library days … and lo and behold, I suddenly had download speeds upward of 8000 kbps (that’s incredibly, unbelievably fast — faster, in fact, that my Airport Extreme ever delivered). That’s using the same Apple laptop, the same Internet provider, the same connection, in the same condo … the only thing that changed was the router.
So: no more Apple Airport Extremes for me. Right now, my Netgear wireless router is the one that “just works,” and, since my schedule won’t accommodate hours and hours of Googling and troubleshooting, it’s the one we’ll be using for the foreseeable future.
(And while my AppleTV can connect to iTunes to rent and buy movies, my laptop still can’t see the Apple TV, so I can no longer stream music or video to the device. Given the problems we’ve had with Apple TV before, I’m about to write it off as a bad purchase and yank it out of the wall, too.)
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