ErrorPort

Apple’s latest strategic blunder with the death of AirPort

It’s a pretty standard pattern. If Apple neglects a product line for five-plus years, it’s dead, Jim. And this one, we actually already knew about in 2016. Still, it’s shockingly dumbfounding that Apple has officially killed off the AirPort product line.

Apple enthusiasts (I’m one, but I keep getting scolded for going against the grain recently on such things 😜) are quick to point out why this makes sense. This is a tiny business for Apple! No one buys routers anymore, they just use the one’s the cable company gives them! Both are undoubtedly true. And yet.

If Apple wants to get out of the wireless router business — a business they helped kickstart — fine. The problem is that they could have — and I’d argue, should have — been fundamentally changing this business for the better, in a way basically no other company can.

I’ve written in the past about what the Apple TV product should have been. To quickly recap: the entertainment box many of us know and like (but don’t love) mixed with gaming (true gaming, with dedicated controls, not the middling iOS ports with that awful remote) mixed with full Siri integration. In other words, they should have made the first “smart speaker” for the home, but actually better. Instead, we got a dumb Apple TV and a dumb HomePod. Two wrongs to make a wrong.

What Apple should have done with the AirPort line is even more obvious. Clearly, this should have been baked into the Apple TV years ago. In other words, the Apple TV could have been and should have been the true “home hub” — not this silliness. The fact that Apple put in all the work they did on HomeKit and yet didn’t realize and/or act on this is, frankly, dumbfounding.

(Basically) every home has a TV. (Basically) every home has the internet.¹ This is literally the entry point into the home. Apple had an opportunity do combine two ho-hum businesses into a very interesting — and just as importantly, very strategic — one.

Nope. Instead, we got a constantly crippled Apple TV, a constantly neglected AirPort, and… the HomePod. Great…

Just to drive it home: these should all be one product.² In the living room. The center of your connected device ecosystem in the home.

I was a AirPort loyalist for years. But a couple years ago, I switched to a set of Eero networking devices. It’s hard to convey just how much better they perform than the AirPort products. But this isn’t rocket science. It’s mesh networking. Many folks, including Google, are going after this. Apple just decided to focus elsewhere.

Which, fine. Again, from a straightforward fiscal perspective, this undoubtedly makes sense. But so did the decision to lose focus on the “Pro” products. Ditto for the education market. As we’re seeing now — and more importantly, as Apple is seeing now, this was all a mistake. And now they’re scrambling to rectify the situations.

The bottom line matters. But it’s not the only thing that matters. Apple has surfaced a rather disturbing trend of late of looking right past any strategic implications of their product lines. They’re not only too far in the forest to see the trees, they’re seemingly chopping down said trees to get a better line of sight. It’s really weird.

So yes, Apple is ceding the most important entry point into the home — the internet connection — to the cable companies and their piece of shit routers. Great.³ Or they’re okay with a handful of third-parties providing better internet connectivity in the home. Which is fine. But weird.⁴ Such positioning seems awfully important for every single device Apple sells. Steve Jobs knew this back in the day. But Apple can’t seem to think beyond his two-decade-old scope, which is troubling, to say the least.

¹ Clearly, I’m focusing on the US market here, but this is increasingly true everywhere, of course.

² With several smaller “hubs” to enable the mesh networking.

³ Consider that as solid as Apple products may or may not be, a lot of complaints derive from how well (or poorly) the internet performs on them. And how often is shitty performance tied to the connection/routers? Often.

⁴ See: above.