Review: Apple Airport Extreme (2013)

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple pioneered consumer WiFi when it launched the AirPort Base Station over a decade ago. The latest version of their latest Airport Extreme Base station looks odd as it resembles a tower of stacked AppleTVs that are bleached white, there's a good reason for that.

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Apple launches new AirPort Extremes, pushes 802.11ac wireless standard

One of the announcements at this week's WWDC in San Francisco was an updated line of AirPort Extreme base stations supporting the 802.11ac WiFi standard that's coming to the new MacBook Airs as well as the Mac Pro. Capable of 1.3 Gbps streams, or 3X the current limit of WiFi streaming, the new base stations also offer double the channel bandwidth, with 80MHz-wide channels providing more room for more data to flow faster than ever. A new Beamforming feature, helps assign more bandwidth as needed to devices instead of spreading the signal evenly.  Capable of supporting up to 50 users, the new base stations offer three Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and one WAN port plus USB 2.0. The new AirPort Extremes are also smaller at around 6-inche high, they have a new rectangular form factor. AirPort Extreme costs $199.

Video: How Curiosity made it to Mars in one piece

If you thought Curiosity landing on Mars was pretty cool, check out this video that shows the extreme engineering and incredible planning that went into sending the rover to Mars. What's more, the computer that is running Curiosity is a heavily modified Apple Airport Extreme. That's right, a modified WiFi router! Based off a PowerPC 750 (PowerPC G3) chip clocked at around 200MHz with 256MB RAM topped off with 2GB of flash storage, how brilliant is that.

Source: NASA JPLNews