Apple AirPort Extreme Question

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The salesman @ bestbuy insisted that I need the AirPort Extreme.

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He's a salesman just doing his job. There's nothing particularly standout about the extreme to justify its price other than how compact it is while including an internal HDD. If your router works fine, keep using it. When it stops working like you want, come back here, and we can discuss routers, but as far as getting the best performance for the least money, it will probably never be your answer.

Proximity to the router is a big factor. Things like walls in between your router and device is another. Wired is always better than wireless. The amount of devices on the network doing things at the same time is also a player.

Any chance you could run Ethernet from the router to the iMac and report back with how well that works?

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Well the airPort and the iMac both have wireless N. But I don't know if that alone justifies buying a new one considering his other devices don't.

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You mean 802.11ac?

As far as getting the AirPort Extreme, I have the last gen and an AirPort Express as a wireless bridge. It works very well. The reason I went with the AirPort Extreme is because I have mostly all Apple devices as well and my old router would not handle >10 devices connected at a time. There are better options out there though that are either cheaper and just as good or better, or more expensive and considerably better. That said, the AirPort Extreme is not a bad router by any stretch of the imagination. Managing it (on the rare occasion) is really simple too with the AirPort Utility iOS app.

So the computers are both running like champs this morning. My guess is that they were communicating with each other passing info, documents, music, pics & that sort of stuff which could possibly been slowing them both down. My router is around 5 years old but is handling the job for now. I guess I'll start looking at maybe getting something newer in the future but for now I'm good. Thanks for all of your technical support

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Managing it (on the rare occasion) is really simple too with the AirPort Utility iOS app.

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I'm crashing at a buddy's right now and he's using an older (802.11n, no time capsule) airport. He's been having issues with internet connectivity, and he's not particularly tech savvy. I figured I would go inside the router console and play around a bit to see what features it offered and see if I could localize his connectivity issues. I was very upset to find that there is no web interface for these devices. On the one hand, that's pretty damn good security. On the other, it's a little inconvenient that you cannot use any device with a web browser to check your settings and tweak stuff. Personally, I don't like the trade off. But it's very good for home users that won't put secure, non-default passwords on their routers.

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I'm crashing at a buddy's right now and he's using an older (802.11n, no time capsule) airport. He's been having issues with internet connectivity, and he's not particularly tech savvy. I figured I would go inside the router console and play around a bit to see what features it offered and see if I could localize his connectivity issues. I was very upset to find that there is no web interface for these devices. On the one hand, that's pretty damn good security. On the other, it's a little inconvenient that you cannot use any device with a web browser to check your settings and tweak stuff. Personally, I don't like the trade off. But it's very good for home users that won't put secure, non-default passwords on their routers.

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All you have to do is download the config tool, though: LINK not sure that's any real security measure over a web interface.

time capsule is just a back up. it is not a NAS