vmarks

cesco said:

Time Machine (though I wonder if this isn’t just marketing )

Time Machine services do work. I'm not sure what "I wonder if this isn't just marketing" means here - with many other routers, if you connect a USB drive, it will not appear as an option in Time Machine settings. Here, when connected with afp://synologyrouter.local, Time Machine sees the drive and will use it without any further configuration. That's pretty easy, which is what I was hoping for from it.

cesco said:

How odd that this router is not yet certified in Canada though it can be purchased on Amazon.ca.
Might  you folks know if the USB port can power a portable drive; would make for 1 less electrical wire.
Pros which make me consider this to replace my aging ABS:
Time Machine (though I wonder if this isn’t just marketing )
Functioning USB ports unlike most mesh routers out there
Expandable with their MR220
Web access thus not a slave to dumb downed iOS app.

I can connect a portable drive to it - but it depends on the power requirements of the portable drive, really.

Here, I have an SD card in the SD slot and a Seagate USB 1TB BackupPlus Slim drive connected to the USB3.0 port. It works fine with just the one cable connected. Those "usbshare1-1" names are the defaults, I didn't bother renaming in the Control Panel. I connected the drive, turned on Windows file services, connected in Finder using smb://SynologyRouter and it works great.

In the old days, Apple would offer something else as a part of the apology, up to the rep's discretion. In an Apple store, this could be like, "pick something else off the shelves", while on the phone it would be, "Do you listen to music? Could I send you some speakers as an apology?" - here, he wanted some money for pants and some money for the cell service he was going to be billed for but couldn't use with a damaged phone. If they had tried to give him a product, and then let him return the product, he'd have had the cash he was asking for.

But he probably got a brusque, over-worked genius before getting the Apple Safety Engineer, was likely in a bad mood to begin with, and the whole encounter felt bad to him. I can see why he walked away. The "we'll replace your iphone" was presumed. "we aren't going to do anything else for you" was an insult from his standpoint.

What this highlights to me is that Apple Store reps aren't given enough latitude to extinguish situations where emotions are inflamed.

ElCapitan said:

As SJ once said: "Even our butts look better than their faces!"

Yeah, everyone's routers are either alien spiders of antennae, or things that attempt to look nice but don't perform as well. 

lewk said:

Are there any wireless access units other than the Apple that have the audio port? I use my Airport units to connect various stereos in different rooms so that I can play the same feed throughout the house. The fact that it also helps even out my wireless is definitely nice, but I'm using them mostly for the wireless audio.

Not so much.

Chromecast Audio is one way of doing it, but it's not a first class citizen on iOS - you define speaker groups in Google Home app, and then push all the audio across. Or you could use AppleTV and extract the audio from HDMI with an adapter (or optical on older AppleTV).

Other things people are doing is running shairport on raspberry pi. You could do it on any linux computer with a sound card, but Pi is small, which makes it attractive for the purpose. this article explains more.

I have looked for a travel router with audio that I could run shairport on, but have yet to find one I can recommend.