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Use the Apple AirPort Express Base Station to Allow Your Mac's to Wirelessly Connect to Your Printers

Although some printers can directly work with Apple Bonjour, a lot of times the Bonjour link becomes unstable and Mac's have problems connecting to their printers. The most stable way that we've found to address this is by simply purchasing a Apple AirPort Express Base Station and connecting the printer through a USB cable through this base station. Note that that you may lose some of your printer scanning features that you had enjoyed when directly connected over USB but if all you need to do is share wireless printing between different Apple devices, the Apple AirPort Express Base Station works very well.

We purchased the Apple AirPort Express Base Station at the new Apple Store in Singapore where the crowds were high due to the new iPhone X launch.

The Apple AirPort Express Base Station was sitting next to the AirPort Time Capsule which were the only Wi-Fi products sold by Apple. It's interesting that while Apple was one of the first major non traditional networking tech players to launch its own Wi-Fi routers, Apple recently hasn't been too aggressive with leading edge Wi-Fi networking products while recently others like Google has been promoting their Wi-Fi  routers like the Google Wifi system and Samsung even has a similar Samsung Connect Home AC1300 Smart Wi-Fi System. The Apple AirPort Express Base Station only supports 802.11n while many of the current routers in the market already support the faster 802.11ac.

The Apple AirPort Express Base Station comes in a small compact package and has a similar packaging style and form factor as the Apple 4K TV.

The Apple AirPort Express Base Station just comes with an AC power cord and documentation.

The Apple AirPort Express Base Station has an Ethernet port to connect to a modem router and another Ethernet port if you need to add additional devices over a wired connection. There is also a USB port to connect to your printer and a 3.5mm audio port to connect to speakers that you want to connect to use AirPlay.

The bottom of the Apple AirPort Express Base Station comes in a rubberized base that grips the surface it is placed on.

The Apple AirPort Express Base Station is outclassed by a lot of competing routers in the market, but is a very useful product to wirelessly connect printers to your Mac using Apple's Bonjour protocol. The Apple AirPort Express Base Station also supports AirPrint which is used by iPhones and iPads to print to printers but unfortunately there is no fine print on the box that warns you that your printer still needs to support AirPrint. The Apple AirPort Express Base Station is not a silver bullet that allows any printer to become AirPrint enabled.