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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing that Apple's are better than average, since they have two versions (the built in HD on a time capsule doesn't make it appreciably different) and maintain them for long periods between upgrades.

Asus/Netgear/D-Link/etc follow the "If we don't release an 802.11ac router every week, we won't get enough press releases out!" model, and their firmware suffers as a result.

I'm not touching those unless I can wipe the stock firmware and replace it with Tomato or DD-WRT.

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Apple's routers are based on VxWorks. So if you trust VxWorks' networking, then you can trust Apples routers.

Personally I trust VxWorks over some patchwork router of the week by the usual vendors. It's used in many safety critical/medical applications, including the mars rovers.

The downside being that VxWorks has very low resource requirements, so some vendors use them to cut resources. Hence, You'd better be happy with the factory provided configuration because you can't flash them.

I recently bought an Asus AC-1900 router (the RT-AC68W) after a long search, specifically for its supporting DD-WRT.

Some OpenWRT routers like the TL 1043ND I have suffer from VLAN leakage. Basically the router separates WAN from LAN via a VLAN config as the CPU has only one LAN port. At the router's bootup, devices on my lan would randomly get a public IP adress assigned by the DHCP server on the modem. Scared the crap out of me. From now on the thing is an access point, not a router.

You can buy routers which come stock from the factory with DD-WRT installed. I just bought one from Buffalo. Zero fuss and works great.

I would trust Apple's even more if the firmware releases were as regular as iOS updates. And the same goes for AirPort Utility releases, especially on Windows.

I have to run the configuration tool in a windows VM because on 10.10 they removed the frameworks it uses to run. I wish they weren't so complacent as to turn my hardware into bricks.

Maybe you just need to reinstall it? I just took a peek at it on my new laptop (which has never had anything but Yosemite installed on it) and it worked fine.

Airport Utility 5.6.1 was the last version that supported some of the older airports. Unfortunately Airport Utility 5.6.1 doesn't work (officially) on anything newer than Snow Leopard, but there's some modified versions floating around that work on 10.9

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