Document Actions

Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n Review

A review of the new Apple Airport Extreme base station that supports the new 802.11n high speed wireless protocol.

Apple's Airport Extreme

Out of the box

Ports

Net Monitor Comparison

Packaging & First Impressions

Like most of Apple's products the Airport Extreme came in a small but well organized box and the first thing you notice about the new base station is just how much of a box it is.

The actual unit is plain white plastic and has a green indicator light on the front. On the back there are ports for power, USB, Ethernet and WAN as well as a security option.

Bring The Speed

In order to get the most out of the new 802.11n router, Apple suggests going to 802.11n only as well as using the 5Ghz spectrum which we did. Of course, to get to 802.11n (draft) you need to have recently purchased Mac and the enabler that ships with the base station. We ran the enabler in our labs on a 24" iMac Core Duo and a pretty brand new MacBook Pro both which went very smoothly.

In our lab tests (see screenshot) we transfered some big files back and forth from iMac to MacBook Pro to get a feel for what kinds of real rates we could get. In our tests we saw a big jump from 300 KB/s to over 5.5 MB/s which is well worth the price. While your actual web browsing speeds might be limited to your ISP connection, the Airport Extreme base station can do nothing but help out.

USB Drive

We will be testing the USB drive and AirDisk set up soon and updated this review.

Conclusion

A nice upgrade in terms of speed and functionality but missing a few things that would make it a perfect ten. If you need AirDisk and the bigger bandwidth, go for it otherwise it might not be worth it.