The original cone-shaped Airport Extreme was a mighty fine looker for a router. This updated model has a less pleasing, Mac Mini-inspired design, but promises data transfer speeds five times faster, thanks to support for the cheetahlike Draft N wireless standard.
With a PC hooked up to one of the three wired ethernet ports and a Draft N-enable iBook working over wireless, a 4GB file transfer a niffy 13 minutes faster than our old “G” Netgear rauter.
Perhaps more importantly, the range is vastly improved, so we can now email from downstairs. The splendidness of the Airport Extreme doesn’t end there. There’s a USB port on the rear for easy sharing of printers, flash drives and hard drives among the computers on your network. It does have a few faults, such as the lack of Gigabit ethernet ports and slightly tricky set-up, but overall this is the devlishly good router.