New Airport Extreme Torn Apart

How did the recently concluded WWDC affect you? Were you blown away by what was revealed, or did the new Mac Pro actually give you flashbacks of a cigarette dustbin or modern looking tissue holder? Regardless, the dust has settled and what’s done is done, there is no turning back now. A new Airport Extreme was also announced then, and it seems that folks over at Apple, despite sitting on a huge pile of cash, do seem to exhibit their more miserly trait at the moment by using a somewhat similar case as with the new Time Capsule, except that the hard drive as well as connectors have been removed.

iFixit’s ritual teardown as you can see above revealed that this would mean there is a 3.5” drive bay which will remain empty, so the brain does start to wonder, what would you want to do by inserting a new drive of your own? Avid DIYers could actually take advantage of the USB port and hook up a bus-powered 2.5” hard drive or SSD within. It has got a pretty high repairability score, so taking this puppy apart and putting it back again shouldn’t pose too much of a challenge to seasoned professionals.

Just for the uninitiated, the Airport Extreme can be best described as a residential gateway device that will merge various functions of different devices, including those of a router, network switch, Wi-Fi base station and NAS among others. The latest AirPort Extreme Base Station model will now be able to play nice with the 802.11ac protocol, where it has a smaller footprint and carries half a dozen antennas, with three of those meant for the 2.4Ghz spectrum while the other three is meant for the 5Ghz spectrum.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Apple
Tags: Apple Inc