Apple has officially discontinued all products in the AirPort family, including the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time Capsule.
Apple discontinues AirPort product line
According to a spokesperson for Apple’s iMore portal, “We are discontinuing Apple AirPort base station products. They will be available through Apple.com, Apple retailers and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last.
In fact, the news doesn’t come as a surprise because the Cupertino-based company has not updated its AirPort products since 2012, in the case of the Express model, and since 2013 for the Extreme and Time Capsule models. In addition, by the end of 2016, Bloomberg published that Apple had completed the development of this product line, relocating the engineers in this department to other products.
According to published information, Apple began closing its AirPort unit in early 2016 in an effort to intensify its focus on “consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue. In addition, since January of this year, it is possible to purchase other third-party routers, such as the Linksys Velop Mesh Wi-Fi system, through Apple.
Unfortunately for the more loyal user of Apple Bite products, the end of AirPort products also means the loss of unique features that are not available through third-party products such as Time Machine’s built-in support for Time Capsule and AirPlay functionality for AirPort Express.
While the latest products in the AirPort line are being “liquidated,” Apple will provide service and parts for the latest models over the next five years. In the meantime, you can still get any of them through the Apple website at a price of 119€ for the Express model, 219€ for the Extreme model, 329€ for the 2TB AirPort Time Capsule and 429€ for the 3TB model.