It depends how you’ll use your AirPorts. You can turn them into bridges, which means they extend a wireless network using Ethernet or wireless. To be honest though, this is mesh network territory, and unless you have a particularly ingrained fetish for speed and will use Ethernet exclusively as I do, then anything else is preferable, even using your power lines for networking such as HomePlug adaptors. I have had no experience with any particular vendors' mesh products.
Extreme, Time Capsule, and Express do offer network services. Time Capsule, of course, can expose a networked disk; this is still useful, if slow. Both Extreme and Time Capsule will expose a disk over USB 2.0 through the included port, though even more slowly. AirPort Express, of course, can be used for AirPlay. All of the devices can share a printer to the network, except that most printers nowadays are already networked. The devices are all capable of joining your network as a wireless client for these purposes, or you can bridge it using Ethernet, and simply turn the Wi-Fi off, just as you would any other peripheral. Finally the Express has a very unique feature: it can join a wireless network, in client mode as before, and can then proxy Ethernet devices onto it by emulating wireless stations on their behalf. In this way it becomes a kind of portable Ethernet jack, for those stations that don't have wireless, like my very old BrailleNote Apex that can't reach the 5 GHz band. But naturally this is a very unusual need, and there are already extender products on the market that do a very similar thing without the added expense and with modern AC Wi-Fi or power line networking. Hope this helps. -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor. You can reach mark at: mk...@ucla.edu and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/macvisionaries/F162932D-808B-4A61-A575-BBFE4EF2D79B%40me.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
