Q: Airport Extreme - Poor Rating on Consumer Reports

Should I be concerned about purchasing the new Apple Airport Extreme Base Station?

Possibly.  The current product was introduced well over 3 years ago, and Apple has not made any hardware changes since that time. Given the fact that it usually takes about a year to develop a new product, the technology in the "current" AirPort Extreme is probably 4 years old.

Your next question might be......is Apple planning to introduce new models soon?  The answer is that we don't know.

The #1 Rated Linksys is $60 more ($240) than the already expensive Extreme ($180).

Is it worth the additional $$$?

I haven't used that model, but another user might have some feedback.

Can different brands of Routers be "mixed" & used as "extensions" of a 5th Generation Apple Airport Extreme Base Station?

Yes and no.

Yes, if the routers are all connected together using a wired Ethernet cable connection.

No in general, if you are asking about having different brands "extend" the signal by connecting wirelessly to other brands

The #1 Rated Linksys is $60 more ($240) than the already expensive Extreme ($180).

Is it worth the additional $$$?

I would look at review on smallnetbuilder.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/view

Look at the routers on the top of this chart for the best performance.

The Asus RT-AC68U is much cheaper and hugely superior firmware to the Linksys.

Specific review here. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32711-linksys-ea8500-ma x-stream-ac2600-mu-mimo-smart-wi-fi-rout…

mu-mimo is not such a great advantage.. we recommend people not invest at this stage.

I have had years of service with my current 2 Extremes with no major problems.

The older design Apple routers are excellent. I am still using a pair of them to do wireless extension.

For an Apple household I do recommend sticking to apple routers.. they perform better than most reviews might show which are testing against PC windows android world.

For PC products I do NOT recommend using Apple routers. The current airport utility for windows is not even valid for use with the latest Airport Extreme. Apple have shown they are no longer interested in the PC world on their routers.

For a mixed products home.. stick to your current extremes and if you want to add a bit of wireless easily and cheaply buy another Gen5 AE from ebay for a few dollars.

Otherwise buy Asus or Netgear AC1900 models.. plug it by ethernet into the existing network setup and run it in WAP mode.

I really thought the newest Airport Extreme was much newer than that.

The "newest" AirPort Extreme was introduced by Apple in June 2013.  Personally, I've owned one for about 3 years and it has performed very well, except for a noisy internal fan that needed to be replaced at about 2 years.

Prior to June 2013, Apple introduced a new AirPort model just about every 12-18 months.

Has that been taken care of in the manufacture of the latest batches?

It's not possible to know what will happen in the future until it comes, since the fan issues normally develop 18-24 months after the AirPort has been placed into service.

In other words, we won't know if the "issue" has been fixed on current AirPort Extremes for some time.

For what it's worth and as far as I can tell, on current models, Apple is using the same fan that has been used since the product was introduced.

Other reviews have taken a very positive view of the Airport Extreme, including this one by a PC magazine, that gave it a top ranking and highly recommended it:  http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/pc-peripheral/10-best-wireless-router-201 6-uk-wifi-3217482/ 

You really need to look at the details and decide what matters to you. Note that Consumer Reports often does not rank Apple computers at the top of its ratings either, yet I buy those over PC's. The Consumers Reports testing gave the Airport Extreme good or even excellent ratings in most categories, and gave it a low rating only in its "long distance" speed test, However other testers have found otherwise (see link above, also user reports on Amazon), sometimes these results are very dependent on the construction of walls and materials where the testing takes place. Consumer Reports also gave slightly lower ratings for the Airport Extreme due to its lack of parental controls and ability to customize Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) or Quality of Service (QoS), which means you can't prioritize different types of network traffic with those tools. Also, the Airport Extreme has 3 instead of the more common 4 ethernet wired ports and has a USB 2 port instead of USB 3.  I use Consumer Reports a lot, you need to look at the basis for its ratings and decide what matters to you. I recently replaced a Linksys router (that had to be periodically reset to maintain its wireless throughput) with an Airport Extreme; the Linksys router had all those highly customizable capabilities through its web based browser utility, but to be honest, I never used any of them.

The only "con" of the Airport Extreme that gave me any pause was the USB 2 port (instead of USB 3). However, our printers and scanners are wireless so neither needs the USB port, and frankly, unless you are located quite close to the router, the speed of hard disk reads/writes attached to the router's USB will likely be dominated more by the wireless speeds versus USB speed. And I have never attached a drive to that USB port anyway. So for me, that did not matter.

Even the reviews by PC magazines and writers are impressed with the ease of setting up the Airport Extreme. When I got mine, I started setting it up via my iPhone just to see if that could even be done, and before I knew it, in less than 60 seconds, it was done! Also, the WPS method of connecting printers and scanners worked easily too, you literally click on something and it's done. I'm pretty impressed so far with the Airport Extreme -- the "beam forming" really works, you can measure this by doing several copy/speed tests in a row, the subsequent tests get faster and faster as the router senses the devices and optimizes its throughput for their locations. My Airport Extreme is on a lower floor but higher floors get about twice as fast data rates as I got with the Linksys n-router previously, and I can also see the wireless signal out in the yard (wasn't possible wth the older n-Linksys).