Google exec Marissa Mayer 'really impressed' with Apple's AirPort WiFi base stations
Mayer originally posted for advice last month on buying a new wireless router for her home use, noting that "it needs to have support for 20+ connections and good range in terms of distance."
Her Google+ follower Saravana Shanmuga advised "Netgear is worth and we can customize !! where apple is good we cant customize."
Today, Mayer reported that she had initially bought a replacement Netgear N600 wireless router from Walmart, but said "I had continued problems even with the new router, with range and devices getting conflicting IP [addresses]" among her wirelessly connected devices at home, which included "a bunch of phones, tablets, Tivos, Google TVs, Apple TVs, etc."
Mayer added, "So, for Christmas, I asked for an Airport Extreme and 2 Airport Expresses (to chain together and create a mesh with better range). I set them all up last night, got all the devices connecting, and so far so good. It's not really a fair comparison, since there are 3 routers to the Netgear's 1, but iStumbler showed a lot more signal strength throughout the house, rarely less than 45%."
Mayer concluded, "I was really impressed with Apple's Airport Utility and how simple it made the set-up and chaining of routers. Hard to make the experience of setting up of a home network beautiful, but at least it was easy. I kind of wish I had gotten a Time Capsule for backups, but I was pretty focused on getting a good router system. Plus, that's what DropBox is for."
Apple quietly updated its Airport Extreme and Time Capsule products last June without fanfare, increasing their output power up to 2.8 times for improved range and reception while switching to a new Broadcom chip shared by the 2011 MacBook Pro.
While NPD hasn't published recent market share figures for WiFi routers, but its last public figures from mid 2008 indicated Apple's share of the router market was 10.6 percent, larger than the Mac's share of PC sales at the time. Apple was reported to be in fourth place behind Cisco's Linksys brand, D-Link, and Netgear, which Mayer reported issues with, despite its reputed "customization" options.
46 Comments
Great. Now we're going to have Google routers that are open to allow you to do what you want with it. They will give it to you for free, you just have to agree to let Google pilfer through every bit sent and received through it.
I agree with Marissa, I went through about a dozen WLAN routers over the years -- and eventually got an Airport Extreme.. I was hooked, everything just worked and I stopped having issues. I'll never buy a non-Apple WLAN router ever again!
Good for her commenting on this .. I want to tear my eyes whenever I see WLAN router recommendation threads and people recommend non-Apple gear.. they do not know what they do not know.
I couldn't be happier with my AirPort Extreme. It works extremely well.
Actually, there is one thing...QoS. With more and more people switching to VoIP, we need some way to keep voice traffic prioritized over everything else. And the AirPort Extreme doesn't allow for that.
I just replaced an ageing 1TB TimeCapsule with a 2TB and it took seven clicks and seven keystrokes to have the new one up and running!
Seven clicks to save and then import the TM config file (the Airport config utility even remembered the path to where it was saved) and the seven keystrokes were re-entering the password.
All of the Macs on the network found the new hard drive and Time Machine kicked in automatically.
Highly recommended.
I just wish I could install Ubuntu on it... Damned walled garden!
Some people complain that you need an app to setup an Apple router; that the browser interface is good enough. It may be "good enough" but their AirPort Utility on Windows, Mac OS and iOS make is so much better, especially if you have multiple routers.
Great. Now we're going to have Google routers that are open to allow you to do what you want with it. They will give it to you for free, you just have to agree to let Google pilfer through every bit sent and received through it.
Android OS is based on the open Linux and most consumer routers run on Linux. Would a vendor using Android be of much benefit over Linux? Is there anything in Android outside of the kernel they would need, assuming we're not talking about a router with a 4" touch display?
I agree with Marissa, I went through about a dozen WLAN routers over the years -- and eventually got an Airport Extreme.. I was hooked, everything just worked and I stopped having issues. I'll never buy a non-Apple WLAN router ever again!
Good for her commenting on this .. I want to tear my eyes whenever I see WLAN router recommendation threads and people recommend non-Apple gear.. they do not know what they do not know.
They are the best and easiest consumer routers. The only problem is that even Apple's routers are feeling the strain of having so many 802.11 connected devices on a single network. We even have wall thermometers and bathroom scales with WiFi.
Sure, they can handle more than enough IP addresses but the processing data for multiple devices at once in a household seems to be bottlenecking at the processor. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple use their ARM SoC/PoP designs based on an iOS(Darwin) in the future to help facilitate more devices running at optimal speeds.