“I tested one of the latest and best 802.11n access points, Apple Computer’s [sic] updated AirPort Extreme Base Station,” Julio Ojeda-Zapata reports for The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
“The white, elegantly understated transceiver is Windows- and Macintosh-compatible, with one important caveat — any laptop connecting to that device must be 802.11n-equipped for the superspeedy networking to work. Some portables now on the market still use 802.11g, meaning they will connect to the AirPort at slower speeds,” Ojeda-Zapata reports.
“I set up a wireless network using the base station and a trio of 802.11n-compatible Macs, including two laptops and a desktop iMac,” Ojeda-Zapata reports. “Wireless networking is a notoriously flaky technology, so I wasn’t surprised to encounter glitches. This occurred most often on the Windows side. While some of my PC portables connected readily to the network, others would not. The AirPort itself sometimes acted up, so I had to reset it and start from scratch.”
“But once I had several machines connected to the AirPort, I could do fun things, such as high-def-video streaming,” Ojeda-Zapata reports. “You can do this on a slower network, but you’re likelier to see stuttering; I saw none of that in my 802.11n testing.”
Ojeda-Zapata reports, “The AirPort has special features aimed to lure buyers away from other brands. It lets users plug in devices like printers and hard drives, for instance. I was able to plug in a Universal Serial Bus hub and then connect a hard drive and two printers to the hub. All those devices were then available to computers (minus the Vista PCs, for some reason) on the network.”
Full article here.
Glitches occurred most often on the Windows side. Big surprise.
Related articles:
Apple’s new AirPort Extreme offers increased speed and range – February 18, 2007
High-quality Apple AirPort Extreme 802.11n unboxing photos – February 04, 2007
Apple ships new Airport Extreme Base Stations two weeks early – February 01, 2007
Apple AirPort Utility 1.0 screenshots, 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station manuals – January 26, 2007
Apple releases AirPort Extreme Update 2007-001 – January 26, 2007
Apple’s new AirPort Extreme ‘AirPort Disk’ feature: cheap, simple network storage for home networks – January 15, 2007
Apple’s new AirPort Extreme supports 802.11n, enables wireless streaming of HD media – January 10, 2007
Apple introduces new AirPort Extreme with 802.11n – January 09, 2007
Do you have an Apple packaging fetish, too? – September 15, 2005
>MacDailyNews Take: Glitches occurred most often on the Windows side. Big surprise.
No surprise at all.
Windows market share figures blow Apple’s outta the water.
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Kidding aside, anyone here try running the Airport Extreme themselves? Curious what others are experiencing.
MDN, check the apple support forums. They are full of folks having problems with the new Airport extreme base station and Airport Admin software.
Also, the Airdisk is not accesible at full n speeds.
Does anyone know if you need a powered hub? I’m thinking of buying on to replace my current Extreme. Right now I only have a printer hooked up, but would like to have the printer and a harddrive. If anyone knows and can share, thanks.
I just notoced that ‘glitches’ rhymes with ‘bitches’
I want one of these, without the other two.
I bought one of the new Extreme Base Stations and absolutely love it. It’s worked flawlessly for me so far. The major selling point for me was the fact I could connect an external USB HDD to the device. Now, I have my entire iTunes library on there instead of hogging half my laptop HDD. It’s wonderful.
Mine has worked flawlessy since it came out of the box a couple of weeks ago. But all its clients are Macs, except for a PS3. The PS3 has YDL 5 for PS3 as a wireless client through a D-Link Ethernet to 802.11g gaming bridge (no wireless drivers for the PS3 yet under YDL 5).
Before the new Extreme, I had a Buffalo base station (802.11n, too). Lots of problems with that, though. Erratic behavior out of the blue.
Am very happy with the new AirPort Extreme this far.
So far the airport part of it works fine, and I can’t complain about the printer sharing. (Not only did it share, but Windows running under Parallels had no problem printing to it.)
Airdisk, however, has so far been a total f-ing disaster. I plugged a minimate drive that has been joined with a mini since I got it a year ago. So it should have just been unplug from mini, plug into airport. No go. Not only is the drive inaccessible, but also plugging in the drive and then trying to access causes the whole base station to go into a panic–green light goes to amber, the airport network shut down, and all of its ethernet ports shut down–looking on the back of the station the ports that were blinking green are suddenly dead.
Unplugging doesn’t help, resetting doesn’t help, the only thing that gets the airport back on the internet and back to throwing up a wireless network is leaving it for half an hour. With, of course, the drive unplugged.
I went on support forums to look for solutions, and my god are people having trouble with airdisk.
I only wish I could add a wireless card to my Mac Pro (dual, dual core Intel)… Apparently, if you don’t buy it with your Mac (figured I could upgrade as I always have), there is no way to add one. I’m stuck with a USB Ad Logic wireless card… 🙁
What the hell is with the hypenated names anyway?
Julio Ojeda-Zapata has been giving Apple good press for quite some time now. Cut him slack referring the “Apple Computer”! Hell, I do it too! Even Apple still does it; or at least not all departments have new stationery yet – I had correspondece with Apple after the name change that still used “Apple Computer”.
Using the Bonjour networking package for Winblows, would have helped the Winblows PC,s see and use the USB connected devices.
Another journalist that doesn’t seem to do enough research.
Is a new Airport Express (Pre-N)expected?
To Mac Pro:
Go to the not-so Genius Bar at your local Apple Store (if there’s one near you) and ask them about the wireless upgrade for the Mac Pro. There is such a part, but it’s not “user installable,” so they’d have to install it for you.
My 2¢ worth…
Mine has 3 macs connected, mixed G’s, an iMac a Mac mini, and a MacBook Core 2 Duo with N. 2 Windows laptops running G, one an older sharp with a link-sys card the other a newer Dell with built in wireless, also streaming iTunes to sound system to the older airport express.
Everything setup in a snap, range and coverage are greatly improved. Happy to say I’ve really had no glitches at all, even with the windows stuff.
Haven’t tried connecting a portable hard drive yet.
i have one of the new airport extreme stations and i have to say it is the best router i have had so far, set up was easy and all of my macs are getting wireless throughout my home and even outside, something not possible before as i experienced many dead spots and limited range.
also the airport express itegrates well and is getting a much better signal to share tunes with the stereo. The air disk has been interesting so far, if the airport is running above 75% i have had no problems viewing, streaming, and moving content to my 2TB drive (with all of my dvd’s on it), but if the airport is running below that mark i have had some issues with hanging media. i am eagerly awaiting my apple TV so i can replace the Mini which is attached to my television with something that is capable of handling the 5.8 ghz band to eliminate this problem, but so far very very happy with the new airport.
A bit concerned that some people are having problems with Airdisk.
I’m planning to get the AirPort Extreme so I can connect it to a Ministack V2 750GB HDD. My wife has about 400 mainly jazz CDs to be ripped into iTunes and she wants them lossless.
Maybe I should hang on till the problems are sorted out but it seems not everyone is having them so I might just go for it.
Hi everyone. I’ve had the thing running for about 10 days with a very mixed network.
1 iMac (intel) – g
1 MacBook – g
1 iBook G4 – g
1 iBook G3 – b
1 PowerBook G4 – g
1 iMac G4 – b
1 MacMini hard wired through Ethernet – no wireless card inside :((
Epson 740 printer
3 Airport Express units
1 TiVo (using a wireless D-Link DWL122, 802.11b)
The Airport Extreme (n) Base Station, and thus my entire network, is hanging off the single Ethernet port of a VOIP modem box so it’s getting a 192.168.1.x address from the phone modem, and then creating its own DHCP/NAT network using 10.0.0.x addressing.
At the start, I had a few problems getting a couple of the Airport Express units to work consistently playing AirTunes; they don’t like to show up in the new Airport Utility unless the gods are smiling it seems. The TiVo Series 2 will ABSOLUTELY NOT connect directly to the new Airport Extreme (n) base, even with all login security turned off; pain in the wazoo. So I have the TiVo talking to an AirPort Express which is hardwired to the Ethernet on the Base Station instead, and it works fine (that’s what I had been using before). The VOIP phone works fine now with no latency issues (I was having problems with my old setup, ergo the new AirPort Extreme box.)
I have not noticed any speed increase in the network (I have no 802.11n devices yet). Same goes for range; my 12″ PowerBook is still at the edge of reception range in my bedroom, as it was before, so running things like Skype from the bedroom has just as many dropouts and latency issues as before – meaning no better connection strength. I don’t know the reason for this.
Printing is flawless from all machines tried so far. Have not hooked up an external USB HD yet either. After reading this thread, I think I’ll hook one up today just to try it.
Of course you can’t get “n” speed with a or g equipped machines.
I thought it was cool that Apple provided the hardware in the machines months before they announced it. V. smart.
It has a lot of features I will need once I get a new laptop. Price could be a bit cheaper and hopefully it will get down to $120 eventually.
Does anyone know if there are USB or Ethernet bridges using the 802.11n standard that are compatible with Mac and Airport Express, so that we legacy Mac users (1.8 ghz G4 upgraded Digital Audio) can get on the video streaming bandwagon?
“Wireless networking is a notoriously flaky technology…”
Truer words were never spoken. And not just on the pc side. I sometimes think
of Airport networks the way we used to think about SCSI networks back in the dark
ages of computing.Everything could be perfectly connected and not work no matter
what you did… And then suddenly it would start working! My experience with Airport
networks has been exactly like that.
No Stuttering on my side. I’m accessing movies backed up from my External drive from my iBook G4 1.2GHz with no problems. And thats using the slower connection. My only issue is that my printer is no longer compatable via Bonjour.
“”Wireless networking is a notoriously flaky technology…”
Never had any problem with my Airports for years… Use them all day, multiple machines,
I think people don’t know how to configure network clients properly…
We have the new Extreme base station and of course have a set up that has 2 of the main issues with the router…VPN networking on multiple computers using Nortel and connecting wirelessly to Xbox Live with the Xbox360.
So, until a firmware update comes out, we are back to the Linksys (only because of the VPN issue as I can deal with the wired connection for the 360).
Can’t wait to use it as it was fast as heck and resolved some connection/drop issues we were having.
Come on Apple…get that firmware update out!
>”Wireless networking is a notoriously flaky technology…”
>Mack responded: I think people don’t know how to configure network clients properly…
Surely the people you’re talking about are the ones who designed the flaky technology right?