With Wi-Fi 7, the latest Wi-Fi standard to be announced by the Wi-Fi Alliance on January 9, it’s made me take a nostalgic look back at when Apple made its own wireless routers, called AirPort.

For those unaware, these were announced way back in 1999 as Apple’s take on Wi-Fi. Instead of having this built in, it was marketed as an expansion card that you would have had to buy as an optional purchase for an iBook — the precursor to the MacBooks we see today.

This expanded to all of Apple’s Macs by 2005 by including AirPort as standard, but AirPort Extreme, which was a router, was also brought out in 2003. Connecting this to the internet in your home was such as pleasant experience because you could configure your network within Apple’s user interface, instead of the confusing ‘Admin’ screens that you would usually be brought to, with a router given to you by an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Despite how good these were, Apple scrapped the entire line in 2018 without giving a reason why. I can’t help but feel that it was, and still is, the wrong decision for a variety of reasons.

A time machine, but not out of a Delorean

In order to explain why Apple’s wireless line has to return, I need to explain how I started using AirPort and its features in the first place.

Back in 2007, I owned an Intel iMac, and because this was an era before iCloud, I would constantly have a hard drive full of photos, videos, and more. Around August of that year, an incident occurred where I almost lost everything, so I wanted to own something that could back up everything automatically.

This is where some good timing occurred. Apple announced Mac OS X Leopard for release in October, which came with a feature called Time Machine. For those unaware, Time Machine backed up almost all of your files, and if you lost something, you could ‘travel back in time’ and grab the file from the ‘past,’ all from a fantastic wormhole-like user interface.

Fast forward slightly to January 2008, and Apple announced Time Capsule — essentially an AirPort Extreme router with a built-in hard drive. This was purposely made to work with Time Machine, but also as a wireless router. It was perfect for me at the time, and it got a lot of use until it stopped working in 2011, and I had to get rid of it.

Time Machine is still in macOS today, but it’s a feature that Apple no longer seems to talk about. It’s still a fantastic feature, and I still use it with a third-party Samsung SSD, but it’s not the same as having Time Capsule.

Since 2011, I’ve also had many wireless routers, thanks to the countless ISPs I’ve signed up to — and they’ve all been terrible. Some can be so slow to change one setting, other routers could have Ethernet ports that simply fail.

Apple’s exit from this category in 2018 only makes it more baffling to me — it had a good thing going with AirPort, but it feels like the company simply abandoned it.

Time for a new AirPort

Apple making a return to the category with new routers and a new line of Time Capsule products would make a lot of users happy — myself included.

With Wi-Fi 7 now official, let’s see an AirPort Extreme router take advantage of these standards and have HomeKit built-in. Currently, you need an Apple TV or a HomePod to act as a Home Hub in order for your smart devices to work with HomeKit when you’re away from your home, but it makes perfect sense to have this as part of AirPort.

Home Hub needs to use the internet to reach your iPhone when you’re away from your home — so surely, having this built into a router like AirPort fits perfectly for its use?

Let’s not stop there, however — a ‘Time Capsule 2’ would be great to see again which not only backs up the Macs in your home but also your iPhones and iPads, alongside storing backup images of your Apple Watches. This would bring another layer of security and comfort that your devices have been securely backed up somewhere else instead of using iCloud Backup — Apple’s method of backing up to its cloud storage service.