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from the stick-to-what-you-are-good-at dept.
Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company's focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter.
Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn't been publicly announced.
Apple hasn't refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn't currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's plans.
Routers are access points that connect laptops, iPhones and other devices to the web without a cable. Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule. The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday November 25 2016, @02:10PM
As someone who manages Windows, Mac and Linux, desktop and servers, for the last 17 years:
Yeah, right.
I pressed "Renew Certificate" on the Mac Server app once. It failed to renew, removed the old certificate from the chain and deleted the on-disk file stored in a hidden part of /System where it keeps them, and refused to allow any further Renews as "that certificate is not pending renewal".
500+ iPads and dozens of Macs would have been out of commission permanently (requiring a complete unsupervise, wipe, re-supervise by hand on each one) if I hadn't a) had a backup of the file from when I first created it two years ago (Time Machine you say? I had Time Machine backups going back nine months. I Time Machine'd several of them and it went back to the old cert but still refused renewal! I'm not even sure how that worked!), b) knew OpenSSL syntax and c) managed to find the hidden location where the old certs were stored on the TM backups.
Literally, I had to hand-renew it from the command-line (including finding the internal private key it had originally used to create it), and plug it back into the servers so that they could continue to supervise the machines past the end of the month. And the only way out if I couldn't was to un-supervise every device I'd supervised with it, which wipes them out.
Ease of use? Yeah right. Next you'll be telling me about their Good Design, as printed recently in a white book with a white spine with white text on it.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday November 25 2016, @07:38PM
Apple has pretty much abandoned the server market, they may be abandoning the true professional market, so their tools in those areas might not be up to snuff.
Never mind that you don't need that level of IT management in normal households, which is what the AC was talking about maintaining.