Airport Extreme Base Station
Here’s a copy of a post I made in Apples discussion forums
I don’t think that I have ever had too much of a bad word to say about Apple products. They have been simple to use but with an underlying functionality that has set them aside from other manufacturers but I fear that this isn’t the case with the Airport Extreme.
If Apple had pushed this purely as a wireless AP then I probably wouldn’t have had much of a problem but they didn’t. They also sold this as a router.
As an owner of many routers in the past I have got used to a level of functionality that has become the standard whether Linksys, Netgear, Dlink, etc and I find that the AEBS is sadly lacking in many areas. I’m happy that for the normal user you can answer a few questions to set the thing up and this is certainly in line with Apples general philosophy but even with OSX I can open the terminal and have a level of advanced control.
Even with the manual set up mode I found that there are many things missing that I would expect to find, I can’t easily forward ranges of ports, there is no web based interface to configure, the parental controls are no more than a basic ACL, I can’t block ports to IP ranges, inability to block certain sites, etc.
It is the parental control issue that has been the final straw in prompting this post. Apple push this as a feature on the AEBS security page of the website. In hindsight I see that they don’t make any false claim but in the same sense they hint at so much more. Its a basic ACL with a time schedule against the MAC address. That is so broad brush its useless. I want to block certain sites, certain services and what of my wired clients? Ignored! I’m about to demote my AEBS to an access point, no.. I’m going to remove it. I already have an access point and I have no 802.11n clients that need it. My old router gave me so much more control and that was just a basic Netgear.
An opportunity missed in my opinion. I’m very disappointed and I would suggest that any potential buyer be cautious before investing in a product that is twice the price and has half the functionality of other devices on the market.
