Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station MB053LL/A [OLD VERSION] by Apple Computer
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Digital camera reviews of Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station MB053LL/A [OLD VERSION]
Digital camera Review: Apple Airport Extreme Base Station (gigabit)
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased one of these from the Apple Store locally last week. Brought it home and set it up from the new Macbook all seemed well. (I specifically purchased this for the usb print and hard drive abilities and mac and win support) All was well on the Mac and then for the XP SP3 machines, all well except printing. What no printing and no real help or suggestions. My own troubleshooting answered it, for whatever reason the included airport extreme cd does not correctly install Bonjour for Windows (required for printing), and you will not get errors during the install just no printing. SOLUTION: Download Bonjour for Windows from Apple site run and choose to remove Bonjour and after that completes re-run and all is well.
The one windows printing glitch is the difference in 4 star vs. 5 star rating.
This is a great solid router for mixed environment with printing and hard drive abilities. Worth the $180.
Digital camera Review: Apple Easy Set Up
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased one of these recently because I like Apple quality, ease of use and wanted to replace my Belkin 802.11G standard wireless router to take advantage of my new Apple iMac 2.8 MHz system with built in pre-N wireless.
Setup was very easy and Apple does a great job of walking you through the necessary screens to get the system set up and running. Even my Sony PC laptop was easy to set up. Score one for Apple. The range is better than my existing Belkin and throughput is at least a blistering 130 Mbps which makes downloads of big files *almost* fun.
I purchased a Seagate 750 MB USB external drive to backup the system and do it remotely through the AirPort's USB port. Hooking up the drive is a bit more complicated - need to use the Apple Airport Disk Utility but again it worked well. Then the wheels started coming off. The Seagate is formatted in NTFS and Apple needs either HTFS (Mac) or FAT 32 (PC) to work properly. I hooked the Seagate up to the back of the iMac directly and reformatted the Seagate in HTFS journaled to optimize compatibility with the iMac. Easy enough, then I hooked the drive into the back of the Airport and communication with the drive wirelessly was great. Next I turned on the backup "Time Machine" in Leopard. The drive was not recognized by Time Machine. I plugged it directly into a USB port in the back of the iMac and life was good - everything worked. Did some Googling and found out that the Time Machine backup program does not work with Airport drives. Bummer - minus one for Apple. Speculation is that Apple will provide a firmware update for Airport that allows it to communicate with Time Machine but as of now it does not.
On the plus side, I was able to daisy chain two Seagates on the back of the Airport - the aforementioned HTFS drive and a companion FAT 32 drive. Both show up fine under Leopard and the FAT 32 shows up under Bootcamped Vista.
In summary, I am happy with the Airport Extreme Base Station as it exceeds all of my expectations with the exception of the incompatibility with Leopard's Time Machine.
March 20, 2008 update. Apple did come through with a software update for Leopard and a firmware update for the AES which does allow backups from Time Machine directly to a USB hard drive attached to the back of the AES. After installing the software and firmware you will probably want to reboot your system and verify that the hard drive is recognized by Time Machine. The first backup took almost 8 hours - just like the initial backup when connected directly to the computer USB port - but subsequent automatic backups are pretty quick. I'm happier now!
Digital camera Review: Apple Wireless
Summary: 5 Stars
This was one the easiest installs that I have had in regards to wireless devices. For someone not familiar with mac, this could prove to be tricky, so some research would be helpful. Ever since I installed it, I haven't had any issues with the it. My old wireless, I had to constantly reset and turn on and off for a variety of reasons. This has been very rock solid.Digital camera Review: Apple fanboi hates it
Summary: 2 Stars
I am an Apple product supporter, but I cannot give this thing any positive comments. I bought this to replace my apple "UFO" router, mainly because it supports connecting a USB hard drive. Since I bought it, it has constantly dropped PPoE connections and the USB drive is rarely reachable. I was hoping that firmware updates would fix this it, but it made it even worse. After installing 7.2.1, I couldn't authenticate the hard drive. I have had to revert back to older firmware versions to be able to connect to the drive.
I AM a huge apple supporter, but this thing is garbage. My rose-colored can glasses see right through it.
Avoid.
Digital camera Review: Apple's router answer
Summary: 3 Stars
Recently I had yet another Wireless router start to fail on me. Granted it was a cheapo belkin. I decided to try out the New Apple Airport Extreme. This brings me into the 802.11N world as well. Some of the highlights;
- 802.11 (a,b,g,n)
- I am glad to see the unit has Gig-E ports now. (although only 3 ports, I would like to see 4)
- The setup of the unit is very nice with the "Airport Utility" app. Instead of going through a poorly designed web app like much of the other wifi routers out there.
- I also like the fact that the unit is highly configurable.
- Port forwarding works well.
- Ability to choose subnet (192.168.1.x, 10.0.1.x,172.19.3.x)
- USB port for printers or HDD's (very rare to find in a wifi router)
Overall it's a great piece of hardware with great range and speed. Although kind of pricey, worth the money.