gdgt

It has the Apple 'Just Works' feel about it, it's the least painless router i've had. Configuration was a breeze, continued use is a breeze.

I have a usb hub connected so I can use print and file sharing (my only niggle is that it only has a single USB port as standard), both work seamlessly with both the Macs and Windows computers in the house.

In around 8 months use it's never had to be reset, which is a blessing compared to the Linksys model it replaced. It seems to have great range, and the Guest Networking is a great touch as well.

It's a great product, but I can't think of a stand out awesome reason to go out of your way to buy one. It does it's job painlessly with no fuss, that sold it for me - and i'd buy another without question.

Two reasons I would recommend an Airport Extreme: ease of use (even under the "Manual Setup" option) and range.

When I bought my dual-band Airport Extreme, I read a review (now quite old actually) of similar 802.11n routers by David Pogue saying that the Airport Extreme had the best range [1].

Second, an Actiontec router is built into our FiOS equivalent of a "cable modem". Because it has all kinds of limitations when it comes to its wireless access point, we got an Airport Extreme to handle the wireless clients. It worked fine plugged into the Actiontec router but it blinked amber, which means there's something that required attention. Airport Utility quickly helped identify the problem (we were running a redundant DHCP service) and helped correct the misconfiguration.

A downside to all Airports is that you cannot just update the settings in a browser but if you have a lot of Macs in your house that won't be a problem.

[1] www.nytimes.com­/2007­/04­/12­/technology­/12pogue.html

I agree with "on" and "CarterA" it really is easy to use. i have one at home and bought one for my parents to use also and have not had any troubles with either. mine has not had any issues in over a year and my parents has been up and running for since December with no problems and they have not had to do anything to it after we set it up.

i am not a huge fan of the Time Capsule though. i i have 2 Macs in my house one is an iMac with 1 TB and the other is an Air. my biggest complaint about the device is that you can't easily expand the hard drive. so if you went in and bought the 500 gig when they came out for the most part you are stuck with that one. i know you can add external drives to it, since it does have the USB port that but thats still another device attached to it and you still have the 500 gig that you have outgrown.

I think this is going to come down to ease of use. Back to my Mac can be configured automatically if you use an Airport basestation, whereas if you use a different type of router, you'll need to set up port forwarding yourself. You also may need to configure your router to give your Macs each unique and constant IP addresses for the port forwarding to work, though that will vary based on the router's configuration system.

The Airport routers also allow you to administer them via a native Mac app on your computer, without needing to use a messy web interface. I highly recommend the Airport Extreme for this reason.

You might also look into the idea of a Time Capsule from Apple if you want to wirelessly back up your computers using Time Machine.