Airport Extreme - Is this a worthwhile investment?

I'm a PC house and just switched from a d-link 655 wireless router to the Airport Extreme base station. I get better distance and stronger signal by far. I bought the latest generation (v5). At this point I have no qualms and think it was worth the cost. Make sure to shop around.

If you bought AppleCare with your Mac, or do so within a year of the original purchase, both it and an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule will also be covered for 3 years.

I can confirm that Pondini's recommendation is a good one.

I have 2 macs, and a time capsule. I've had to do a complete system restore before, and though it is not the easiest process, it actually worked perfectly. The time capsule is a very nice backup system, and the integrated airport works better than any router I've had before. That said, I got this stuff in early july, and have not had the opportunity to test the "shelf life" dbeman mentioned.

I have a second gen Airport Extreme and second gen Time Capsule, and never had any issue with it. Don't know where you got the information that they failled after 18 month, that is not true!

They are not perfect (for instance, I would like the ability to have QoS control), but they are easy to manage and very good in general.

At this point I'm leaning toward a Time Capsule; but may just opt for an Airport Extreme and a non-Apple external drive.

If you are planning to use Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive attached to the USB port of the AirPort Extreme....you might want to keep in mind that this is not supported by Apple.

True that is it not supported, but still work not too bad.

In my case, since I have a TC available, I will probably upgrade the HDD and have a supported solution with better suited capacity for my need.

but still work not too bad.

Works for some users just fine. Works for some users some of the time and not at all for others. I've tried this 3-4 times over the past few years as an experiment with mixed results.

I'm in the "works some of the time" category. Backups do work initially....for a time, anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before I get error messages and have to "Repair Disk" using Disk Utility. This works for time before I have more error messages. Eventually, Disk Utility can no longer repair the backups and I have to start over.

Judging by the number of posts we see from users who are having problems when they try this, It's fair to say that this is not a proven, reliable method for Time Machine backups.

That might be why it is not supported by Apple.

My advice to users who want to try this method, is to have a secondary backup plan in place.

dbeman wrote:

Thanks for the comments. There are some user reviews (both on Apple's site and others) mentioning that the power supply on these products, the Time Capsule in particular, tend to stop working between 12 and 18 months.

Look at the dates, and the purchase dates especially, if they're mentioned. There was a problem with a goup of TC's made in early 2008, where Apple got some bad capacitors from a supplier (as did the makers of many electronic products). Those did have a high failure rate in that time period, and Apple extended the warranty on them, even paid to have the data copied off.

Since then, however, there's been no general problem. As with any product, a few will fail, of course, and a few will live for many years.

I have used all the same hardware for about 16 months now, and it still works wonderfully.