Reviews for AirPort Extreme Base Station

great router.. when it WORKS... Constantly dropping its internet connection. daily, and unreliable. Been to every forum and looked everywhere on google for a solution. no luck. apple needs to fix this. Im better off using a cheap router from walmart.

40 of 70 people found this useful

It's a decent unit, I am extremely disappointed in the range of it. My home isn't even that big and my desktop along with my modem are at one end of the house and my apple tv, iphones and laptop struggle to get a signal at the other end of the house. What's funny is that I can pick up my neighbor's antique 2Wire router FROM ACROSS THE STREET!! Yet I can't pick up a signal from my own router, with an open hallway from one end of the house to the other in a 1,500 sq ft home?!?! It's just not worth it. I feel I could have gotten one for less that $100 that would be better. Oh, and our iPhone 5's are no where near as reliable as our 4's and 4S's were. I guess the "edge" that helped Apple stand apart, died with Steve Jobs.

43 of 68 people found this useful

I have had my Airport Extreme for two years now. It has worked flawlessly for the majority of the time. It is the hub for our wireless network including a Win 7 desktop, Win Vista (stop snickering) laptop, Mac Mini, iPhone 3GS, iPad 4, iPad Mini, and Lexmark Printer. Up until recently, all devices connected flawlessly with stable connections at impressive speeds.

This all changed about two months ago. I am not sure if it was due to a firmware update, increase in network traffic in our building, or that the device itself is failing, but the range of the Airport Extreme has been literally cut in half. Now, we can barely get a signal even in the next room. I went through all the channels thinking it might be signal interference before buying an Airport Express in hopes of extending, strengthening, and stabilizing the connection. Nothing seems to work. The connections are weak and intermittent.

The Airport Extreme was awesome when it was working properly, but a mere two years later, there is definitely something wrong. I do not know if the device has simply reached the end of its life cycle or if the recent software updates crippled it. Either way, I think the love affair with my Airport Extreme is over; it is obviously time to move on.

49 of 75 people found this useful

Don't buy if you're planning to use the external hard for time machine. After trying several times and I started to read some internet pages and found out that is not supported by Apple. Don't make the same mistake I did.

25 of 38 people found this useful

Network reliability is only so-so, especially with PC VPN connections, which suffer from frequent drops. The USB drive feature does not work reliably, since the drives frequently will not wake up and are then not accessible over the network. Anyone who thinks this solution is going to give a spot to park reliable backups is in for a disappointment or get used to disconnecting and then reconnecting the drive by hand. 5 GHz range is not as good as the slower wireless G connection, but both are better than the original round Airport Extreme. Not worth $179, that's for sure.

11 of 16 people found this useful

I recently had an issue with my internet line dropping. I upgraded my modem and airport extreme and the issue continued. The AT&T technician ran tests on my line and asked what lights were lit on the modem when it dropped. He indicated that there is a problem with the router. I ended up getting an AT&T combo of modem and router and so far so good.

I previously had an airport extreme and did not have any issues with it, it is just recently this cropped up.

Setting up the airport extreme is a cinch. I don't know whether there is an issue with the firmware or not, but it is very frustrating that the line drops for no reason.

94 of 108 people found this useful

Like many of you I'm an Apple fanatic. Yet I'm seriously underwhelmed by the Airport Devices.

The Airport Extreme can't share it's drive as a Time Machine volume (See Apple's article PH4327), or better, the website Pondini .org which actually provides details.

You can connect a printer, but the Airport Extreme not going to add AirPrint (for iPads) to that printer. (Not that this would be hard for Apple)

I returned an Airport Express for this because the 2012 Express kneecapped ethernet at 100mbs/sec (vs GB). I'm reticent about getting a Time Capsule as that has many 2 star reviews mainly complaining that it has poor throughput as a router and the disks fail dismally after ~2 years.

Might as well get a 3rd party NAS for disk sharing. At least those are competitively overpriced. But that makes me wonder - why bother with the Extreme?

38 of 50 people found this useful

Before you buy these products AirPort Extreme and Express make sure your ISP modem is compatible with these products. In Canada on Shaw network there are serious issues of compatibility between their DSL modems and AirPort products. I bought both of them only to realize they do not work well together. I had to use my old N1 Vision to interface between DSL modem and AirPort. I would have to say that Belkin routers are doing better job than AirPort. My wireless network did not become better by using Airport. Belkin N1 Vision is better.

36 of 61 people found this useful

I'm stunned that Apple apparently didn't test this device with FAT32 disks (or have a way to format as HFS+ built into the "AirPort Utility"). The FAT32 disk I have connected can read just fine over the network (although it sleeps the disk after 15 seconds or so), but cannot write to the disk from any of my network devices. When it does successfully write the speed is laughably slow. I guess that's what one can expect from a company named after a fruit.

45 of 96 people found this useful

I have really liked the product overall since I got it 3 months ago. It was easy to setup and update.
But last month I got a newer ReadyNAS NV+ to go with my old ReadyNAS NV. I have been setting it up to do some more serious work and was checking the logs when I noticed hundreds of bad packets, TCP retransmits, and unrecovered TCP retransmits. Previously I had never had error problems, but cable will go bad as will switches.

I went ordered new Cat 6 cables and then Cat 6a cables to see if they made a difference. There seemed to be some improvement, but the errors kept coming.
I was able to connect each unit directly to my computer with no problems. Then I put each unit with a static IP connected to my Procurve 1400 switch hooked directly to my computer and got no errors. So the Airport Extreme is the bottleneck causing the errors in my network. I don't really know why yet. But this seems to be pretty shoddy for a newer router.

39 of 52 people found this useful