[Someone1234]

Depends on which Apple Airport you're utilising. In my experience the Airport Express line (wall socket mounted range extender/WiFi AP) is pretty bad. Seems to get quite hot under medium loads and needs to be reset a lot. Seems like a design trade-off in the sense that Apple went with something small and easy to conceal, but in doing so kind of ignored the heat dissipation.

The Airport Extreme base stations seem pretty solid. But are 100% more expensive than a comparable Asus offering. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if they offer 100% more value to you.

I would also like to say that in this day and age having to use an app/application to configure your router just feels wrong to me. Every router on the market has had a web-server/webUI since the Linksys WRT54G became popular. It is obvious Apple does it as an ecosystem lock-in technique, just to stop Windows/Linux/etc clients from trivially configuring the devices.

[fredsted]

AirPort Express is not in wall-socket format anymore. I own the latest one - I only use it for AirPlay streaming/WiFi bridge, but it has been 100% stable (as long as you connect it to another AirPort - other routers will cause random disconnects). Yes it gets hot - any fanless device gets hot - but hot enough to damage anything. Only bad thing is it doesn't have 802.11ac.

Also, sure, you're probably right about the vendor-lock in thing. But I also think Apple wants to make sure the user gets a good experience. With a Web app it's harder to do that. But the apps are really nice and simple to use, and after I set up a device I don't mess with it besides opening up ports. That's just the tradeoffs you live with when you get Apple devices.

That's why I think there's a huge opportunity in creating well designed, good-looking, user friendly network equipment.