Apple AirPort Extreme Review

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Carrie • February 5, 2007
Rating: 3.5/5
Just got mine and so far I am impressed. It seems to be reliable (have not needed to reset it yet) and I like that it has a USB port in it so I can add a printer or hard drive. I do wish it had more ethernet ports though. I know you can always add a switch but I am not very technical so that worries me.
Rating: 7 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Ben • March 8, 2007
Rating: 4/5
If you are an Apple owner, you need to get this router, the range it provides is amazing. I am having trouble getting multiple connected systems to see the connected hard drive though, and Apple support has not been too helpful.
Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Justin • August 11, 2007
Rating: 4.5/5
Although setting up the hard drive is a little tricky on a PC, overall the performance of this router is outstanding. The range is much better than any router I have ever owned and i’m still just running 802.11g. Be sure that you add the routers ip address (found in the airport utility on the home page) to your firewalls "allowed" list and your hard drives and printers will work perfectly. Overall a great router.
Rating: 9 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
David Frampton • October 7, 2007
Rating: 3/5
It’s a cheap and feature complete router, but falls short of Apple’s usual standards and my expectations.
The first problem is the speed of USB connected hard drives. With a USB external hard drive via gigabit ethernet I only get about 6MB/s writes and 12MB/s reads.
The major problem however, is stability. When I first bought this router I had continuous problems with it dropping the external internet connection. Pulling the power out and plugging it back in again would bring it back to life.
Recent firmware and perhaps other updates have improved this a lot, but I still get the odd drop.
The stability of the connection to the USB hard drive is abysmal however, and has not been improved with any updates. one or other of my macs (running 10.4.10) will loose the mounted hard drive at least every day or two, and then will not reconnect again until either the router or mac is restarted.
Also the setup utility needs to restart the router every time a change is made, and the restart process takes a few minutes, and sometimes the router does not come back up at all, requiring pulling of the power plug. So configuration can take quite some time if you need to experiment a bit.
On the plus side, there really isn’t any competition for the feature set at that price, printer sharing has worked great for me, and setting it up on windows was not a hassle. The wireless connection is fast and strong, and after initial problems with interference with our cordless phone setting it to 5.8Ghz has made these problems go away.
Rating: 6 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Paul Weeks • November 21, 2007
Rating: 3/5
I and LOTS of others are having major problems with disk access with the Airport Extreme. In a nutshell, my base station drops the disk about every hour with the 7.2.1 firmware (latest as of November 07), back revving to 7.1.1 fixed the problem for a few days then it dropped altogether. I’ve given up using the disk server feature. For wireless and print services it’s fine, but not for disk access. Here’s a thread on Apple discussion forums. If you’re buying this for disk access, beware! Read and be informed as to what you’re really buying.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1106671
Rating: 6 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Sam • December 31, 2007
Rating: 3/5
Not bad but a few issues made setup challenging: 1) needed to power off my cable modem AND kill battery backup to reset it and get it to pass APBSE a valid IP. 2) USB hard disk was originally formatted with NTFS. Had to reformat to HFS+ to get to work and errors go away on APBSE setup. Had to dig quite a bit to discover this and temporarily move a lot of data to accommodate. Drive shows on WinXPpro machine, not iMac presently. 3) Printers worked just fine and USB hub as well 4) PS3 connected up to APBSE with no issues thus far…. I have to continue exploring why the disk isn’t showing up on my Mac as I expected it and also weigh in on the performance of the drive through the APBSE which has been raised as a concern. No problems with drop outs.
Rating: 6 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
JP Williams • February 14, 2008
Rating: 4.5/5
I purchased my Apple AirPort Extreme Gigaport last weekend at my local almost out of business CompUSA store. I had been doing research on -N-routers for some time but I was not totally satisfied with what I was seeing and reading. A friend of mine who owns a Mac suggested I check out the AirPort Extreme Gigaport and sent me a link. I was resistant but the write-ups seem generally positive. The clincher came when I saw it at CompUSA for 30% off the normal price. I bit and was surprised at the ease of installation. My Vonage came up before I was even able to access the Airport settings. Wireless G speeds are very good (my 2 laptops are not wireless N capable) and my 2 wired desktop systems seem much faster when moving large files. I’ve ordered (2) giga pci cards and will be installing them into my wired systems this weekend. I’m looking for even better performance when moving large files between systems. I do have one gripe; I hooked up my 500 gig external USB2.0 drive to the USB port on the airport. I was able to access the drive from any of my four systems by mapping to them but was not able to see any of the 100 gig of photos, video and music files on it. It did allow me to create new folders and move data into those folders but I could not access the existing data on the drive. The drive is formatted fat32 as required so I’m not sure what the issue is. I have a smaller 40gig external HD that I had recently formatted to fat32 so I plugged it into the USB port on the AirPort. It is working fine and I can access and move data from any of my 4 systems. It works just like a little server. I think I will remove the data temporarily from the 500 gig, reformat fat32 and place it back into the airport USB port, then restore the 100 gig of data to it. I’m sure this will resolve the issue but it is a real Pain to do so. If anyone has a better solution please let me know. All in all I am very pleased with the ease of install and the performance of this device and I am happy I purchased it.

John
Rating: 9 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Laurent Geuzaine • February 20, 2008
Rating: 2.5/5
This router advertised some great features such as Mac/pc compatibility, Ethernet connection with 1 Gig, USB port… Free basic support for 90 days.
I had been disappointed with a few things after setting it up and some normal usage.
1) I didn’t like at all that I had to install software on my pc to talk to the router. In other words, we can’t use a web browser and enter the router IP address to access the router settings.
2) After adding network components, I had an error reporting an IP address conflict with another system on the network…
3) After updating my router settings, I was getting an error 6722 on a randomly base reporting an error while trying to access the base station.
4) I was disappointed to only have 3 Ethernet port instead of 4 like any other router.
I decided to bring this hardware back and get something cheaper with hopefully less problem.
Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Konrad • April 15, 2008
Rating: 1.5/5
I have a Windows XP laptop and the main reason I got it was to hook up a printer and share an external hard drive with my Mac. For a while it was working but after spending hours trying all the solutions I’ve been able to find in apple and other forums I still can’t print or share the hard drive (though I can get online with my PC)…my problem is ignored on the apple user forum. it looks like I’ll have to purchase apple care to get any kind of answer. So if you have a lot of time and money to throw at this thing go for it.
Rating: 3 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
Fred • July 11, 2008
Rating: 1/5
I’d decided to convert from Windows to MAC and at the same wanted to set up a wireless network at home. My first MAC purchase was a MACBOOK and thought I’d go with the airport extreme for the wireless component since I was going MAC. The MACBOOK is great, however, I wish I hadn’t gotten the Airport extreme. My job takes me on the road, and I haven’t had a bit of trouble connecting away from home. However, when I am at home trying to connect is a chore. I spend most of my time troubleshooting my wireless connection. I’ve spent hours on various forums learning about the problems that I have and it seems like many people have had the same troubles, but no solutions.
The most frequent problem is suddenly not being able to connect. I’ve literally recycled my modem and the airport extreme a hundred times. I have done soft, hard resets, all to no avail. Funny thing about all of this is that my window PC connects without a problem.
One final thing, after the latest updates last week, it’s gotten worse. Apple is no better then Microsoft, in fact, their worse because they are way over priced!
If you want an expensive white plastic square for decoration, go ahead and buy the airport extreme.
Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.
meborg • September 29, 2008
Rating: 5/5
I bought one on Friday, set up on saturday work great, great range, everything works well.
Rating: 10 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.