Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple is missing THIS!”.
Hey everyone Travis here and apple needs to make this product again, and this specifically is the Airport Extreme and it’s the last model of its kind to [ Applause. ] exist. Apple’S airport was a product line of routers that they made from 1999 all the way up to 2018. So let’s take a little bit of a history lesson and go back to why that product was so important and why I think Apple should bring it back. The airport line of products was announced in 1999 at macworld and in classic Steve Jobs fashion. It was a one more thing. This ending of the keynote was split up into two parts: one for the airport addin card and one for the airport base station.
The airport adding card was first and Steve, held an iBook and showed that it was connected to the internet wirelessly on stage with no cables and even showed a hula hoop around the iBook to prove that there was no secret cables running to the computer. I am going to be making many more videos throwing it back old school on Old Apple products and how they’ve shaped the company to this day so make sure to subscribe and hit the Bell. Now the world of laptops was much different in 1999, but this was right after Steve. Came back and made a whirlwind with the iMac and apple was really really really hyper, focused on specific products for specific uses, and they even had a quadrant showing they had a personal laptop and a personal desktop, a professional laptop and a professional desktop, and they eliminated Tons of products that were in development when he was not at Apple, so the airport add-in card was a revelation, but at the same time it needed to go with a base station.
So Apple announced the airport base station, which was going to be your router and it had a built-in modem and 10100 ethernet. So you can hook it into a DSL modem, a cable modem or a terrestrial ethernet, and it takes over from there and gives you the wireless base station and six-year-old me would have never guessed that we would have the internet speeds that we have now, as I Was sitting at my computer dialing into for the internet for the first time and this product looked very unique as a lot of the products did in that late’90s Apple era, having a UFO type shape or a slime if you’re into that kind of thing – and this Was the beginning for Apple’s take on Wi-Fi, as we know it today, the airport line of products went on to live for several generations, with many different types of products, with all different kinds of use, cases and form factors. Another notable release was the airport express in 2004, and this router looks a a lot like a current MAC power adapter, and not only did it act as a router or a wireless extender, but it also had a 3.5 mm Jack on it. So you could plug in a pair of speakers, and why would you want to plug in a pair of speakers to your router? Well, of course, you would plug in speakers to your router, to stream music across your home in 2004, using iTunes and the streaming protocol called air Tunes, which is basically the great-grandfather to what we know as AirPlay 2. Today, I’ve got one right here in my pocket. It’S not that I’m just happy to see you and uh. That’S it! So you just plug it in moving forward a little bit we get to 2008 and apple announced the airport Time Capsule. Now 2008 was a very good year for the Mac. It got a lot of great releases, but the notable one was the MacBook Air at the time. The MacBook Air was not the low-end base model.
Computer like it is now. It was pitched as a premium computer to live alongside the MacBook and MacBook Pro. The only caveat here is the fact that, because it was so thin and at the time we didn’t have things like USBC, it sacrificed a lot of ports to be so thin and in the year prior in 2007, Apple released Mac, OS 10 leopard, and in that Was time machine which was honestly the coolest way to backup your computer, but time machine relied on connecting a physical, hard drive to your Mac, for it to make backups and in the case of the MacBook Air you’d, be using your single USB port and Apple’s answer To this was the Time Capsule, which, which was basically an AirPort Extreme, with a hard drive thrown in this allowed for you to be able to back up all of your computers on the network, wirelessly to a single device and the final airport product to come out Was the Airport Extreme in 2013, this guy right here at the time it had blazing fast, 802.11 AC, Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi 5, as we know it now it had three gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB 2.0 Port, so you could plug in Printers or external hard drives To it and that AC Wi-Fi standard with significantly faster than the 802.11n that we had previously and it featured cool things like beam forming to be able to allow for a better signal to your device from the router. This also had a 2 or 3 terab Time.
Capsule option sold alongside as well and in 2016 Apple announced that they were going to remove themselves from a few product sectors, and one of those was the airport line of products which went on to live until 2018 when Apple finally killed them now in 2023, where Are we well honestly, I think we’re at the point where we need a new airport. Routers can be incredibly unreliable, cumbersome and honestly get in the way a lot of the times, which is ironic, considering the fact that they are the literal backbone to our everyday lives. These airport routers, in my experience, owning several of them, were incredibly reliable and they were basically a set it and forget it type device and fun fact.
The 2006 AirPort Extreme was my first ever Apple product that I bought all to play. Gears of War on Xbox live in 2006 because we did not have Wi-Fi at the time and other than the Airport Extreme. In my experience, the only other router that’s come close is the amplify alien.
The amplify alien takes on a similar type of form factor as the Airport Extreme. It has a really cool touchcreen on the front and it has Wi-Fi 6, which is a lot more advanced than this wi-fi 5 or AC version of the airport. But it’s very reliable. Still, though, the app integration in that thing is not 100 % great and I feel, like apple Nails, the user experience on things like airpods and now that Apple has so heavily invested Ed in the homekit ecosystem. Alongside homepods, I think there could be a very good product line here, so this is what my wish is for what could be an airport Ultra, a Next Generation airport device could take on a similar form factor to the airport extreme, but with a 2023 Apple refresh Design, my hope would be four 10 GB ethernet ports, three for devices on your network and one for your internet access alongside that, a thunderbolt four port, so you could plug in external, drives to act as your time machine type device or you could plug in a Raid drive to expand the network attached storage and this device, which I’m calling airport Ultra, would act as the heart of your home network.
It would be your router your homekit Hub and have support for home appliances through thread networking and the majority of those tasks. Right now, the homepods and the Apple TVs take on that task, and additionally, this would be my favorite feature. The airport Ultra could utilize homepods, homepod, Minis and Apple TV to create a mesh Network. These devices that already exist in many people’s homes would would boost the Wi-Fi in the entire home, providing a very strong, fast and secure Wi-Fi network and with Apple’s focus on privacy.
These days, the pipeline to the internet, which is your router, should be taken into account. Much more than it is and could include features directly built into the router like iCloud private relay. This type of feature on a network level would increase the privacy on every device on the network.
So all of these features combined, the airport Ultra, would slot in perfectly with all the other Home type devices that apple is selling and and give you a better experience with all their other products, providing a very fast strong, Wi-Fi connection. Obviously, this list of features is a total pipe dream and a hope that Apple could cook up the best router in the game. So that’s been a little bit of a history lesson in Apple’s involvement in Wi-Fi technology and my total wish list of what could be a really cool product line of new routers comment Down Below on what your wish or feature would be in a NextGen airport product.
Thank you so much for watching this is Travis and have a good night. .