Apple AirPort Extreme Base (MA073LL/A) 802.11a/b/g Wireless Access Point

Yes, the big news the day this product came out was the iPhone. iPhone, which is yet to be seen, and is not what these people have done for a living for the past 30 years. And yet, a bread and butter device- the lowly WiFi hub, was truly and remarkably transformed that day, and unless you were looking for another reason, you wouldn't have heard. Simply put, Apple turned the WiFi hub from simply being able to support a printer into being a stand-alone disk server (That's right- every computer in the house can have access to a 500GB shared drive- it is already here).

I am a long term Mac user. I mean since I was 13 in 1984. With time, Apple has shed a lot of their high prices, and made some really practical things come to the market. And yet, they themselves seem almost embarrassed by having come up with something useful, and want to be better known for elegant form factors. In comparison, Bang and Oulfson have the elegant form factors and have yet to produce something useful, much less something inexpensive, so this is more of just an observation than a criticism. And yet, the new Airport Extreme 802.lln hub has a lot of really practical and powerful features in a simple to use device.

Background

The first appearance of Apple Airport hubs was a simple 802.11 hub shaped like a squat space capsule with built-in ethernet and phone modem support. This network I had up and running in about 30 minutes, the time it took me to recognize what I was doing. The hub was hidden on top of a cabinet in the kitchen, and quietly provided access across our little home in New Orleans. This version supported 40 bit encryption, though the 802.11 cards we got for a pair of iBooks to use on this first network in 2001 were 128 bit capable, but it would not be until the first airport extreme 802.11g hubs showed up that this would be implemented (funny thing with Apple- they try to make what they build today as forward looking as possible).

Cheapskate engineer with Scot lineage that I am, the airport extreme hub, which turned the space capsule white, with its three flavors (modem, no modem, modem and printer support, all at different prices), did not get picked up for early adoption at our household.

The next development in the saga of Apple wireless was the mini airport express, which had an ethernet plug and a USB port so it could support a printer, and also had a sound port so it could drive speakers for iTunes music in the home. We got one to expand the network in our larger house in Arizona and used it to hook up a Canon S500 printer- although this unit periodically gets confused by print jobs arriving with the printer off, it works well, overall. Just whatever you do, make sure you check the priner is on before you start sending jobs to it.

The airport hub we originally had was attached to a cable modem in Arizona, and really started using its full throughput for the first time.

In the meantime, my photography was becoming a problem. Well, not the photography itself- drive space and sharing are the real problem. Even at six megapixels, my SLR has plowed a swath through my drive's available space, and my wife and I constantly remember photos, but do not know who has them on their computer.

Then Apple quietly dropped the new Airport Extreme Base Station at the same time as the iPhone. True to form, the iPhone was sleek, elegant, and beautiful- it had to get top billing. But the new Airport Extreme is also a server- and while the iPhone is still sometime in the future, the Airport Extreme hub has taken the place of my old silver space capsule Airport, and a wirelessly served 500GB LaCie hard disk has taken the place of our worries over how to share photos.

Description and Usage

The new Airport Extreme 802.11 hub comes in a small package which feels WAY too heavy for what I have come to expect in a wireless hub. Inside is the slightly smaller white box from Apple, which is just barely larger than the square hub, which seems a bit bigger than I thought it would be (it is 50% wider than the hard disk it is used with). Strangely enough, all that is left to be found in the package is the power supply, with nice long wires (yep- they noticed we are putting them on kid and interference resistant bookcases), a CD, and what could euphemistically be termed an instruction booklet.

The instructions don't really exist with this product- no kidding, if you look up ANYTHING, it says to go to the menu on your Mac or PC and look for it. What about attaching a printer? It has a picture of what plug to hook into, then says to run the software and follow the instructions. Ditto for a hard disk. Ditto for a cable modem. I definitely had the feeling the tech writers had nothing to go on except an engineering drawing and the specs.

And here is the rub- if you have two generations of previous airport hubs, you will now have three generations of software on your computer, two of which WILL NOT set up this network. The only way to figure out what to use is to get info on each version and look for the one released in 2007. I would have been done in about 30 minutes if I had done that first, instead of following the instructions, which tell you to go to the control panel, which, as it turns out, has the last airport you HAD linked, though there have been several system updates since then. If anyone should have been able to do this, I would have thought Apple could get this figured out. The correct installer has the right instrucitons, though- it even correctly said all the sysem needed was to reboot the cable modem to get going.

So, once this is unscrambled, the setup is pretty easy, though you are DONE with your old 802.11b hubs when this version goes on line. The 40bit encryption is not compatible with the new hubs. End of story. The previous Airpot 802.11g hubs will seamlessly join this network, as do older Macs with the 128bit airport cards, so the only thing that got retired was the hub we were retiring after 6 years of service.

This hub has no modem, so dial-up is not an option, either. As a useful feature, it DOES have indicator lights with the ehternet hub and three ethernet expansion ports, so you can see your devices are alive and talking to each other as you hook them up instead of trying to figure it out through the computer.

In news of the weird, apparently people with 802.11n cards in new Macs need to cough up $2 to turn that feature on. That's right, the people who are about to charge $300 per phone, in an era when mobile companies give hell-phones away, want $2.00 to turn on a feature they already built in to the computers (thanks for the note, lukeiamyofatha!).

The good news is hooking up a hard disk to the new hubs is seamless- you just plug it in. Go to your computer mac icon and the area where the network shows up, and the hard disk will show up with the name it had when hooked up directly.

In terms of speed, the airport link is definitely faster than a thumb drive. The copy progress bar seems to have great difficulty in predicting transfer times. As far as I can tell, internet takes priority for bandwidth, so a disk copy time counter gets confused. I started a 30GB batch copying, and with a prediction of 18 hours, it was done in eight (why not hook it up directly? I was curious about how long this really took). The drive is accessable to all computers in the network simultaneously, and for normal file transfers (less than 30 MB), is fast enough for only a few seconds of transfer time.

Conclusions

The new Apple 802.11n Airport flat out works well, and unlike TV servers in your house, it solves REAL problems like backing up files and maintaining photos where people can get to them. It is a shame the still-vaporware iPhone has taken the limelight from such a practical and useful product. The setup is close to seemless, if you know to kill off your old airport software FIRST, and once it is running, it is a dream to use.