Any value to using Apple wireless router in mixed mode home?

Sure, if you value paying much more than necessary.

The Airport Extreme is a pretty good router, but both Cisco and Dlink make better, cheaper products.

This is an all-Mac house (G4, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro), but my routers are Dlink (an older DGL4300) and Engenius (as an AP at the back of the house). I buy Mac computers, nothing else; I don't buy overpriced Seagate HDs from them (that I can get from TigerDirect) or their monitors or mouses or Time Capsules or Apple TV and certainly not a wireless router ...

So it really does NOT mater what wireless router to use?

I can use a non-Apple router with an Apple device ok?

OK thanks you answered my previous post already!

I thought maybe a person HAD to use an Apple wireless router for an Apple device.... duh! Dumb me I guess

Look into the Samsung Galaxy Tab and see if you still want an iPad.

(9 min) No camera, SD card, microphone, printing, or Adobe Flash on the iPad. Choice of email application. No jailbreaking required to restore functionality. Choice of 3G carriers. etc.

Speed comparison:

Nope. Unless you're in the same room as the access point, you're mostly likely to be using "ordinary" 802.11g, not any of the other modes that only offer more speed (not more range). If you're going through walls, 802.11g is good enough. What I don't like about the Airport Extreme Base is that I have to use the Apple supplied PC config software, instead of just diving into an HTML web page setup.

Yes looking into that one as well...just not sure if I want the smaller 7" size yet though

If it's Wi-Fi certified, it should work (assuming there are no remaining bugs in the firmware):

Sure it works. I have 4 customers with iPads. The wireless routers are Belkin something, 2Wire 2700HG, Netgear WGR-614v7, and DLink N150/DIR-601. Various iPads drift though my office, which has a Linksys WRT54G v3 running DD-WRT. Assuming the iPad and iPhone have similar wireless clients, the only problems I've seen is connecting to a really ancient DLink something, that apparently had a broken WPA-PSK-TKIP. It would connect unencrypted, but fail when encryption was enabled. Also problems with repeaters and range extenders, which do not support anything better than WEP encryption.

On the other foot, I have 4-5 Airport Base Stations, both the gray and white flavors, waiting to get fixed or recycled. 802.11b or 802.11b/g only. They're the ones that look like a mushroom. They're in my junk pile because the customers found them unreliable or unusable. All were replaced with commodity wireless routers, which were a big improvement. I can did out the exact complaints, but as I recall, they were very difficult to duplicate. Rather than deal with the problem, I simply replaced the wireless router. Note that these were all Mac users (usually a MacBook or MacBook Pro).

Thanks Jeff

hey I see you are a Ham as well!