I agree that “obsolete” is an exaggeration, but from my point of view I’m making an upgrade from WiFi 5. WiFi 7 has way better throughout and possibly better real life coverage than 6, so I have no reason to settle with WiFi 6 when 7 is about to be readily available. I live in an apartment with plenty of competitors for the frequencies with good internet speed and plenty of NAS-ish use. And as mentioned, I was only sharing my personal reasons for why this isn’t a box for me. Maybe it is great for you and I’d be happy to learn more about your use case.

A rubber duck that is more rubber than duck but also more duck than a rubber duck.

More things I come to think of: Great for finding specs that have been wiped from manufacturers site. Great for making summaries and comparisons, filtering data and making tables to my requests. Great at rubberducking when I try fix something obscure in Linux though documentation it refers to is often outdated. Still works good for giving me flow and ideas of how to move on. Great at compiling user experiences for comparisons, say for varieties of yeasts or ingredients for home-brewing. This ties into my first comment about being a game changer for information in old forum threads.

A game changer in helping me find out more about topics that have wisdom buried in threads of forum posts. Great to figure out things I have only fuzzy ideas or vague keywords that might be inaccurate. Great at explaining things that I can follow up on questions about details. Great at finding equations I need but I do not trust it one bit to do the calculations for me. Latest gen also gives me sources on request so I can double check and learn more directly from the horse’s mouth.

The two things that decide this device is not for me:

1. WiFi 6 when 7 is already in the shops. The wifi portion of the router will be obsolete very soon.

2. I need one uplink and 3-4 ethernet ports. Consumer WiFi routers have this.

So I’m just staying patient for my eventual upgrade from WiFi 5 to 7. I’d been more interested in a non brickable OpenWrt 1+4/8 ethernet device and get me a separate WiFi bridge.

Wait what Mac?

Interesting. This is what I was going for in my thoughts. But so how would it be reimagined through a contemporary retro wave? Or was the arty and dark witch house exactly this?

I’m thinking that vaporwave is a niche glitch aesthetics spinoff from the dial up experience.