Comments on: New AirPort Extreme Features Leopard Ready?

By: nick Regan

nick Regan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:51:22 +0000

i just wanted to know if i was to put the base station in my kitchen and my wireless router is in my room can i use the express to be used as a repeater i know the speed will be slower because my router is g but can i use it as a repeater basically?

By: Bottleneck

Bottleneck — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:54:47 +0000

Basically this is a silly conversation as if you are a tech person you realize that this makes no sense at all. For all those people that said the Extreme does not make sense they are right. If you have a N-router that is capable of the advertised 300Mbps throughput but you only have 100Mbps coming in then you have natural bottleneck. How can you get 300 out if you only get 100 in. Therefore you are really transmitting 100 out as that is your bottleneck. A N-router with gigabit is insane. I own the Airport Extreme because I wanted to check it out. Once I got it home I realized that it did not have gigabit (my fault as I should have read more about it). I am taking it back today unless Apple has done the classic switch on me and the router is actually gigabit and needs a firmware upgrade like the notebooks that shipped with N wireless cards (I discovered before they annouced by installing windows on my macbook). I would wait or at the very least get a router that has the ability to receive more than 100Mbps. Later.

By: confused

confused — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:13:47 +0000

How about this scenario? I have 5 firewire / usb drives. Can I chain the 5 drives together via firewire and then attach it to the router via USB and have all of them be available on the network? Or will only one drive show up?

By: drkmstr

drkmstr — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:17:44 +0000

Linksys offers a 4 port 10/100/1000 ethernet edition of it’s 802.11n router. Since apple makes computers equipped with 10/100/1000 network cards it does seem silly to not have an apple router capable of 1000

By: Alison

Alison — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:20:37 +0000

Well, I am miffed that there isn’t a firewire port because I have 2 firewire hard drives that I wanted to use. These cost £100 each so I can’t go and buy usb ones now. Real shame, I so wanted to have my hard drives tucked into the cuboard and back up wirelessly.
Cheers.

By: Martijn Stegink

Martijn Stegink — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:30:17 +0000

Firewire doesn’t really make sense for this device. USB does up to 480MB which is faster than the wifi or direct connection can deliver anyway. And most external device have USB not firewire.

By: Time Machine via AirPort? at MacMove

Time Machine via AirPort? at MacMove — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:54:43 +0000

[...] Well, over at The Apple Blog, BJ Clark is thinking along the same lines, with some up-to-date information regarding the new Instant Drive Sharing capabilities built in to the upgraded AirPort Extreme: [...]

By: La nueva Airport Extreme y el futuro Leopard

La nueva Airport Extreme y el futuro Leopard — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:19:50 +0000

[...] Acabo de leer en en theappleblog algo que a muchos nos puede interesar. En las nuevas Airport Extreme recién presentadas este martes, se encuentra la funcionalidad de Instant Drive Sharing, que podríamos traducir como “compartición instantánea de discos”. Se refiere a la posibilidad de conectar un disco a la entrada USB 2.0 del Airport Extreme, y dicho disco es compartido a todos los usuarios de la red. [...]

By: Scottie Biddle

Scottie Biddle — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:57:13 +0000

Excellent Point Niel- all those Mac mini-shaped HDDs now have a new home. It’s a shame the Apple TV doesn’t share the form factor or have expansion, or you’d be able to store every movie ever on it.

By: BJ Clark

BJ Clark — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:43:17 +0000

Good Point Niel, hadn’t thought of that one yet, but it does make sense.

@kaiser: All that sounds good and all, but really the only reason I back up is for drive failure, and all the file system tricks in the world won’t fix that.

By: Niel

Niel — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:01:47 +0000

Now it is clear why they dropped the UFO shape in favor of a flat top. Look for third party drive enclosures with the same footprint for stackable goodness…

By: ShavenYak

ShavenYak — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:37:57 +0000

Not to mention, there still are basically no DV camcorders that can stream video over USB. FireWire is here to stay, but it would be silly on the AirPort. A USB hard drive is more than capable of keeping 100mbps Ethernet or 802.11g (and probably n) saturated with data.

By: Gareth Potter

Gareth Potter — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:55:34 +0000

I don’t think one needs to start lamenting the death of FireWire yet. There are, as always, three reasons why FireWire is not included: (i) component cost, (ii) controller and port size and (iii) the fact that if this is intended as a backup device as your post suggests, the speed of FireWire is not quite so essential.

And if you’re one of the types that still believes dropping FireWire from the iPod was part of an Apple conspiracy to kill it, go and find out just how slow the transfer rate is on those iPod hard disks (and, indeed, the flash memory most now use). Consider also the above points and then ask yourself what the point would be of continuing to equip a consumer electronics device with pro-level ports when all Macs have had USB 2.0 for some 3 years now.

In short, like BSD, FireWire is not dying.

By: Scottie Biddle

Scottie Biddle — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:45:30 +0000

Whoa Whoa Woa! Who said that Leopard is coming out this summer. I’m still convinced that it’s coming out before the Extreme ships in February.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:37:22 +0000

I don’t understand why you would build an N router an not add gigabit ethernet. Most vendors seem to omit this though.

By: kaiser

kaiser — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:13:46 +0000

re: no gigabit - doesn’t really make sense on a consumer device as it will push up the price and you can’t get gigabit speeds via airport anyway. Yes, it would be good if there are two machines connected via wire, they could talk gigabit…
As for no FireWire - there are no FireWire printers (ok, very few) so why put two ports on the device (which is trying to keep small) when one port will do the trick. I’m sure that Mac*Pro stuff will continue to use FireWire.
As for Time Machine - I doubt that this is the reason why the hard drive can be added to the base station. Time Machine will, on a pure Leopard install, be able to use some advanced features in ZFS (a new filesystem to hopefully replace HFS+) that Time Machine won’t need an external drive to work it’s magic (filesystem snapshots and copy-on-write is how it will work)

By: Richard Neal

Richard Neal — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 03:51:53 +0000

Darn, I noticed this as well, and I was just about to write something about it.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 03:46:03 +0000

What I find odd though, is that the new Airport Extreme only has 10/100BASE-T Ethernet. Even the Mac Mini and Macbook have Gigabit Ethernet. For time machine, wouldn’t Gig Ethernet be preferable?