Apple Ending Development on Airport Wireless Router Products

There are more indications of the direction where Apple is headed. Yesterday I found a couple of posts noting that Apple was ending development on their Airport wireless router products, including their Time Machine product. From MacRumors:

The news comes from a report by Bloomberg, who said Apple has been slowly shutting down the division over the past year and made the decision "to try to sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue."

For my money, Apple's wireless router line offers some of the best products available. While some may suggest that there are plenty of equally good wireless routers out there, they may not remember the days when many of the routers on the market didn't work well with Apple products. Why? No reason, they just didn't.

Then there are those features like AirPlay that some of us built portions of our audio system around.

And it goes without saying, that I don't travel internationally without bringing along my Airport Express.

But lately, we don't use AirPlay much anymore. Something in the network or the Apple TV (maybe because I don't have one of the new ones) started causing terrible lag and frame drops watching videos. It sure would be nice to get some development on that issue.

While this is sort of an abandoning pro users thing, it's also a computer versus watch and phone issue. And frankly, between the unnecessary Apple Watch and the iPhone without an audio port, I think the Apple internal team could learn a thing or two by revisiting the wireless router products and remembering some aspects of what actually made Apple products great.