Is the new Airport Extreme worth buying?

I was talking to an apple rep at Comp USA about the airport extreme and he didn't really seem to know what or how it would benefit me if I dumped my old linksys and bought it. Is there anything special about this router that should make me buy it?

Mactheknife said:

I was talking to an apple rep at Comp USA about the airport extreme and he didn't really seem to know what or how it would benefit me if I dumped my old linksys and bought it. Is there anything special about this router that should make me buy it?

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Are you having difficulties with the Linksys? Do your wireless computers have an 802.11n card?

If the answer to both of those questions is "no", then I would say keep the Linksys.

If you do a lot of high-bandwidth consumption activities on your LAN (for example streaming video from machine to machine) and all of your machines either have 802.11n cards or you plan to upgrade them to 802.11n, then you might want to consider it. Likewise if you're having trouble with the existing Linksys router and you want something that's fairly future-proof, it might be something to think about.

Otherwise, I'd say don't waste your money.

If you are using several external HDDs or intending to use in the future, AE is a good investment. With the new AE you can share the HDDs within your local network. When it comes to Internet, you won't get any speed benefits(You will have to wait till you get a faster internet connection).

The 802.11n will support throughputs of up to 100 Mbps, so if you have a Mac capable of also doing 802.11n, and anything else that supports 802.11n as well, then it is well worth it, simply due to the increased throughput. An example of one such device is a USB hard drive connected to the Airport Extreme using its NAS capability.

Essentially, I believe it is WELL worth it!

Since you have the G5 iMac, you definitely don't have the built in 802.11n card that comes with the latest Core 2 Duo Macs. I'm not sure whether your MBP is Core Duo or Core 2 Duo, but even if you have the latter, the Airport Extreme still won't do you any good as your iMac will be a bottleneck when sending files between the two computers.

If you plan on hooking up an external hard drive, then maybe you might want to look at the Airport Extreme. But to be honest, it'll probably be easier to just to move the drive between the two computers, not to mention cheaper :bomb:

I can't recommend it yet. I'm having nothing but trouble. If you're attracted to it because of the potential for networking USB external drives, do your homework. There are A LOT of folks out there having trouble.

Yes the new airport extreme is worth buying , I am new to mac January 17th and it was very simple to set it up for my Printer external hard drive..the wireless speed is so much quicker then the other router I had set up. you just have to follow the instructions.
Cheers J.T.

Per xtophercaa's post above, while I do believe that the Airport Extreme *will* be worth buying very soon, like most new hardware, I would let it have its teething problems in someone else's network, not yours! Wait a few months and then do it, when 802.11n is more ubiquitous.