> Edit: And you know what? How about bringing back WiFi 6E AirPort Extreme.

I’m lucky to have bought an AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule just before they were discontinued. I have no idea who I’d turn to now for plug and play home networking. I hope they come out with some updates, because I don’t feel like doing research into that space again.

I actually recently bought that last ever Airport Extreme with Time Capsule and wow, I'm pleased with it for the price I paid on ebay. Plus now I have backups of my personal and work computers! The only issue I've noticed is that you can't set discrete DHCP settings for your personal vs. guest networks, so my guests have to manually set their DNS since they can't reach my pi-hole that's on my personal wifi. But that's pretty acceptable since I don't want people to get too comfy on my guest network.

I would really love to see Airport come back with a 1-3 year old A-series chip, kind of like what they did with the HomePod. Except without all the AI/always-on microphone crap.

I would have said splurge for a Ubiquiti Dream Machine, but it's not quite the automatic recommend it was before they started taking a "go fast break things" attitude toward their software. Still better than any consumer-level gear though.

I was on the Ubiquiti train, but then I found out the owner started cutting costs and outsourced development and now there's headlines about ads in the dashboard. I assume it's only a matter of time before they start cutting corners in manufacturing and quality of components.

The ads complaints are a little overblown IMO. It's not like they're selling your data and ad space on your dashboard to other companies. They're just showing you their newer product lines from their older product lines, it seems more like a deprecation warning than advertising to me.

Edit: Ok I immediately regret defending Ubiquiti after the new top story about the covered up data breach. I agree it seems like there is some crazy mismanagement going there based on this and other leaks/rumors over the past year or two.

Which is fine if there is an option for me to turn it off. But from the settings I couldn't fine one (I might have missed it as I don't login that often and it doesn't bother me too much).

“Not quite”? We’re talking about the Ubiquiti discussed in https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-b..., are we?

If so, and if that whistleblower is right, “attacker(s) had access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee, and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies.”

They recently started putting ads in the management console. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628198

I spent some really frustrated hours with the non-Pro Dream Machine before I sent it back. Instead, I‘m using a Unifi USG and two APs, and am really happy with this setup.

Not sure exactly when you had the UDM, but the earlier firmware for both the UDM and UDMP was awful and filled with bugs. It has since gotten a lot better. I haven't had any issues with my UDMP since the newer firmware and my home internet experience is much smoother than with my consumer routers (which would randomly drop connections or refuse new connections until a reboot... full NAT table maybe?)

I've heard good things about Aruba Instant-On: https://www.arubainstanton.com/

I've heard nothing but good things about their enterprise gear. They've obviously got to do some market segmentation but they appear to be doing that by having APs with lower density than the enterprise gear which shouldn't be a big issue for most homeowners.

>I have no idea who I’d turn to now for plug and play home networking.

Not as simple as Apple's was, but Ruckus' gear is good.

> Looking forward to Safari [1], if we look at their Developer Release Note there has an unusually large amount of work in the past year post Safari 14. I think they hired some of the Firefox developers to Webkit. Hopefully that will speed up certain features implementation.

While certainly some people have been hired from Mozilla, I don't think it's particularly significant.

The areas which have seen increased activity are mostly down to earlier architectural work being completed, both speeding up new feature development and accounting for lack of new features previously.

> Hybrid in person gathering offline

This is basically the "flipped classroom model", which I like a lot.

I think a dedicated in-person conference where it was assumed you had already watched pre-prepared videos and then presenters did either "office hours" for semi-formal group Q&A or "labs" for hands-on working through examples together would be pretty awesome.