Apple may be killing off its Wi-Fi router business, according to a report that suggests the engineers who develop them are being reassigned to other divisions within the company.
Apple's Wi-Fi routers include the AirPort Express, a $99 white box that has been redesigned several times since its introduction in 2004. Its last refresh was in 2013, however, and Bloomberg today reports that the team who works on it and other Apple routers has been gradually disbanded over the past year.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg says the decision to disband the team indicates the company doesn't plan to develop new versions of its routers, which also include the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule.
Apple did not immediatley respond to PCMag's request for comment.
Those pricier devices—up to $400 for the version of the AirPort Time Capsule that includes a 3TB hard drive for backups—were also introduced more than a decade ago during the early years of Wi-Fi adoption. The ubiquity of ISP-provided routers, the rise of the Wi-Fi-connected Internet of Things, and newcomers like Google have all threatened Apple's position in the high-end router market.
So have rapidly changing Wi-Fi standards, which Apple has been relatively slow to adopt, instead relying on its routers' easy setup and tight integration with the Mac ecosystem to woo customers. Still, the current versions of the AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule both include support for dual-band, 1.3Gbps Wi-Fi.
If Apple does stop selling its routers, it will follow a recent trend to streamline product offerings and focus on the most profitable parts of the company. Cupertino exited the external monitor business when it stopped selling its Thunderbolt Display this past summer. The $999 monitor had not been updated since 2011.