Macworld San Francisco Special Report: New Airport Extreme Base Station
Apple has (relatively) quietly introduced the new Airport Extreme base station which has some similarity in appearance to the AppleTV....with 802.11n 200Mbps+ wireless networking capabilities, the enhanced range capabilites that 802.11n delivers, and the far greater total WLAN bandwidth....
Most 802.11n implementations provide "switching" of the wireless network and therefore each client has dedicated bandwidth rather than the shared bandwidth of today's 802.11b & g. The new Apple device appears to have more ports and some of the functionality that high-end networking users have asked for to bring Airport more into line with the sorts of things that one can do with nearly any other inexpensive Linksys, Buffalo, D-Link et al. base station.
Many of which can be modified to run powerful Linux-based firmwares such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato.
The new Airport Extreme doesn't give up much in its published specs about its internal architecture; thus far it does not appear that this device runs Mac OS X or uses the specialized/embedded Intel chips that Apple is deploying with iPhone & AppleTV.
However, Rumors intends to be on the leading edge of hands-on reporting with all these new devices. It's not cheap or easy to do this, but that's our job -- helping you decide how to make your investments in Apple's technology (and/or its stock, if that's your thing).
We've been deploying the very latest Macintel systems around the world through our association with Xerces Consulting, and for one example we are really excited about the iPhone platform entirely independent of its cellular aspects.....as a hand-held computing platform and information access device for medical applications in particular.
Having witnessed the shortcomings of the medical industry's information-workflow firsthand, many of the Xerces members who have sick or injured over the past several years are eager to get their hands on these devices for all sorts of applications other than the obvious things that iPhone and AppleTV will be used for.
