Review: Airport Extreme

I've been having a lot of trouble lately with my internet connection. According to Comcast (It's Craptastic!), it's not them, so that of course means it's me. So I decided to replace my Linksys wireless router with the new Apple Airport Extreme.

The Airport Extreme is definitely better looking than the Linksys. Linksys has to have some of the most god-awful fugly hardware out there.

Setup was simple enough - just plug in, install the software, and away you go. The only trouble I had was trying to use the old "Airport Setup Utility" versus the new "Airport Utility". I did not see the new version. You would have thought Apple could have deleted the old utility. Not a big deal, just a minor annoyance.

Setting up security, access levels, etc. is extremely (pun intended) easy. You can either use the step-by-step wizard or get into the nitty gritty via the manual setup.

I also hooked up an "Airport Disk" which is one of my USB 2.0 external hard drives. Very slick having access to my backup drive from our two MacBooks and iMac without any of them physically connected. There are 3 ethernet ports on the back which supplies network access to our Vonage and PS2.

While it is pricey at $180; the ease of setup, Airport disk, asthetics, 802.11n speed and more make it worth it.

BTW - my internet connection is more reliable meaning that the Linksys was probably starting to fail.