We switched from the wirecutter's recommended AC router back to an older AirPort Extreme and everything got better immediately. I won't miss Apple's monitors because they cost way too much for what they offered, but Apple has been doing wireless right since they brought out the first airport (a friend of mine worked at Lucent at the time and they were excited that someone had finally shipped a usable implementation of their technology)

Ars Technica's article basically says good riddance, but if you go back to their original review observed that the AirPort Extreme crushes all competing routers on both ease of use and performance.

It really is; I'm going to go buy one as a backup. I purchased the original first gen time capsule, and it ran for over two years straight without even rebooting the damn thing. Short of a hardware malfunction (which is exceedingly rare in my troubleshooting experience, but power surges happen..) they just work.

> The irony is the Airport Extreme performs better than the equivalent Ubi AP.

Consumer-grade routers usually are faster. What they are not is more reliable, or easy to use/manage.

My Airport Extreme goes YEARS without me touching it. It took me a couple minutes to set up. I very much doubt that Ubi's ease of management or use is superior. Equal? Maybe. Superior? Nah.

Have you ever set one up? They are insanely easy to manage and use. Superior? Likely. Ubiquity has amazing software. I set up 2 edge routers recently, they never need to be restarted. Also, the newer firmware has really good setup wizards for the basics. Almost impossible to screw up.

I've had significant issues with both Uniquity and Apple APs, so I wouldn't necessarily say that one is that much better than the other.