07-08-2015, 11:30 AM
The Grim Ninja wrote:
Apple's routers are extremely competitive with other high end offerings. They have great hardware and a nice warranty, but they don't have quite as much for user configuration [which often isn't a bad thing]. My Airport Extreme is 8 years old now and just works. I remember with my old routers I used to have to constantly pull the plug to reboot.
My mom has a sub $40 Vizio router that ran for over 150 days before I rebooted the thing (had to physically move the router so no avoiding it). Granted it was running OpenWRT, but a router requiring constant rebooting makes me think you went from a really cheap model from, say Belkin, to a $150+ model from Apple.
I find most of these reliability comparisons to not be, pun unintended, an Apple to Apples comparison. As far as lack of user configuration, this is never a good thing. Forcing users to have to dig through ever feature to get setup is of course bad design, but so is needlessly stripping out functionality. As an example, why can't I use an Airport Extreme as a client bridge? Why can't I use a USB modem as fallback or even a primary WAN connection on the Airport Extreme?