Apple announced quite a few new products today… New MacMini’s, new iMacs and new MacPros. But my favorite updated product today has to be the Airport Extreme base station. Why, might you ask? Well, the new Airport Extreme base station has a feature that, in my home, will be a solution to a networking problem that is created by many different devices running at different speeds.

In our home, we have a G3 iBook (802.11B), an iPod Touch (802.11G), a MacMini (802.11G) and an AppleTV (802.11N). To utilize our home network to it’s fullest wireless speed potential, I have actually set up 2 different routers. One of these runs at 802.11B & G speeds and one runs at 802.11N 5GHZ speeds (for the AppleTV). I view a lot of digital video on my AppleTV, and that video is changing daily, so I need to be able to send large files across the network to it quickly, so I have an Airport Express dedicated to getting video to the AppleTV. The rest of the network is trudging around at the slower speeds.

Well, enter the new Airport Extreme. It actually features Dual-band wifi networking. With this you can now have these 2 different wifi networks running off the same device, simultaneously. Additionally, you can also have network attached storage and shared printers on the device. Attach a powered USB hub and you can even put multiple drives on the Airport Extreme (this feature was available on the previous generation of Airport Extreme).

At $179, the new Airport Extreme might seem a little steep, but for anyone who has created a crazy home network like mine, this is the answer to our problem!