So I bought the Apple Airport Extreme...

I needed a new WLAN base station because I will move in with my girlfriend to our own apartment. In the new apartment I want to extend my local network from my computer room to the living room and I also want to be able to play music in the living room - all this without cables. Apple Airport Extreme combined with Apple Airport Express is a suitable combination for achieving this - at least on paper.

We have not yet moved to our apartment so I haven't really connected the Airports to my network. However, I have played with the Airport Extreme just to to see what it's all about. I expected a great Apple out-of-the-box experience. Everything just working - or so I thought! I had spent almost double the amount of money than would on a normal WLAN+ethernet switch and the first time I launch the Airport Utility on my Windows XP box I am faced with an "unsuccessful network connection" error message. Bugger!

I reboot the Extreme and try again.
Bingo.

This time I see the Airport Extreme in the Airport Utility. Now I am faced with the question if I want to upgrade the firmware on my Airport Extreme. "Now that is nice", I thought. Why not upgrade to get a even more working box. However, I am, mildly said, disappointed when I see a dialog informing me that the firmware upgrade was unsuccessful. Bugger again!

Oh well, I just go on an configure my new cute white box. I again select the Airport Extreme from the Airport Utility. Failure again - the box shows the green status light indicating everything is fine, but the Airport Utility cannot connect to the damn box. DAMN! Reboot.

Now I am able to connect to the box, I tell the utility I do not want to upgrade the firmware and finally I have configured Airport Extreme to suit my needs. The configurations I made included port forwardings and specifying a MAC address into the DHCP server so that my server can always get the same IP address. I also changed the address space of the internal network. Nothing too fancy, for an expensive Apple box, right?

Wrong.

I am not sure what is going on, but Airport extreme will randomly disconnect all network connections. I can get an IP address to a client machine, but the machine cannot connect to the Internet. NAT problems? The only thing that helps me in this situation is to reboot the Apple extreme.

What is going on here?! I will tomorrow call Apple service desk and ask for a replacement unit. I don't know if that will improve anything, but I am very disappointed in Apple right now! Shouldn't Apple be all about easy setup and reliable hardware?

..and I haven't even tried to connect my Airport Express with WDS to the Extreme and stream music with AirTunes. What should I expect the outcome from that to be?

Edit: So. After two replaced Airport Extremes it seems that Apple has finally managed to find me a unit that actually works. The first replacement unit died the first evening and its MAC address for the WLAN card had disappeared and it failed to go into 802.11n mode. Now I have the latest revision on my replacement Airport Extreme and it, believeit or not, actually manages to do a reasonable good job - something I would have expected from Apple from the very beginning.

My experiences with Apple regarding Airport Extreme has raised some serious questions about Apples quality control. Why pay extra for Apple's products if you don't get anything extra? I am willing to pay for a good device, that "just works" and probably even looks good. But this was not a good Apple experience for me.

Many thanks to VAR Import in Turku and Mika who helped me with the service!