5 ms·

Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industria

Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...

spopejoy 2mo ago
It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.
LargoLasskhyfv 2mo ago
Because otherwise the Punx don't recognize their Cyber.
ultrarunner 2mo ago
I couldn't agree more. It makes it difficult to attach my reputation to when making suggestions for hardware purchases.
- jack_pp 2mo ago
  if your rep depends so much on visual aesthetics then I'd say you don't have much rep to begin with. if someone trusts me they'll buy whatever I say regardless of how it looks, and likewise if I trust somebody to recommend a piece of hardware I know the aesthetics are irrelevant and they know more than I do about the specs compared to the competition.
all2 2mo ago
The WRT54 is still one of my favorite pieces of industrial design. Small case, ~~purple~~blue and grey, two antennas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
- excalibur 2mo ago
  Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.
  - M95D 2mo ago
    > I think you can still load OpenWRT on them Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be. The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.
  - tapper 2mo ago
    Yeah me to. I hade a WRT54G V2.2 for ages. Loved that thing. Just toslow now tho.
    - ninjin 2mo ago
      As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
- bschwindHN 2mo ago
  My first WiFi router :) I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
- auselen 2mo ago
  One could stack them.
Karliss 2mo ago
Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere. If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors. If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.
- cromka 2mo ago
  That complaint was about its styling, not number of antennas
- buildsjets 2mo ago
  Why does Wifi 5-7 require designing the case so it is shaped like an F-117 fighter jet instead of a box of candy?
  - Onavo 2mo ago
    A shit ton of beam forming and phased arrays. Why do you think all of a sudden there's a bunch of "WiFi Radar Imaging" projects popping up on HN? It's not just because of advances in ML. Boost the output power by a few more magnitudes and you can probably ship them to Ukraine.
  - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    Because the gamers and dads who make all the purchasing decisions about household routers love F-117s, and stealth bombers, and consider fighter jets and black “Nighthawk” branding to be way sexier than a pink box of candy.
  - Karliss 2mo ago
    Don't buy one which looks like that if visuals are important for you. I already told that there are plenty of models which avoids this design and form factor. Do I have to spell out specific manufacturers and models? Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design. You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers. Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP. Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms. People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality. That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff. Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend. White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.
mike_d 2mo ago
Because a modern wifi router requires a minimum of 6 antennas. 9 is even better. This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge. Do you have other ideas for how to lay it out?
- MrDrMcCoy 2mo ago
  My radio knowledge is not up to par, but couldn't a phased array antenna setup allow for friendlier form factors?
  - nine_k 2mo ago
    But usually it is a phased-array setup, or it seems to be, with a row of antennas. Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.
- ssl-3 2mo ago
  Some 3-band wifi 7 AIO routers that resemble neither spiders, nor trash cans: https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7 https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7 https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-mesh-systems/asus-zenwifi/asus-zenwifi-bt10/ https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...
  - mike_d 2mo ago
    The Mikrotik HAP have terrible coverage, and the other two are the hallmark trashcan design I mentioned.
HumblyTossed 2mo ago
Right? I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.
bloqs 2mo ago
Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing
cduzz 2mo ago
I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them. And they don't look fugly. It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
- burner420042 2mo ago
  Documentation for how to set these up without the cisco control platform being present is hard to come by. You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.
  - cduzz 2mo ago
    Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such. That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features... Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for. It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones. Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
    - vdm 2mo ago
      LLMs are great at checking logs and tweaking these clis in a logged in ssh tmux pane
    - Rediscover 2mo ago
      About the Nintendo Switch 2: Maybe try perusing https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/solution_wlan_does_not_connect_to_switch_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/sol... Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).
nine_k 2mo ago
The spider look comes from multiple antennas. Multiple antennas are needed for beamforming [1]; they represent a minimal phased array. [1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-explained-how-it-makes-wireless-communication-faster.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...
- cduzz 2mo ago
  It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders. But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
  - d3Xt3r 2mo ago
    > and they look like UFOs not alien spiders. I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.
    - nine_k 2mo ago
      Ah, these so-called SciFi routers.
    - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
      It is rather disturbing to me that WiFi routers already look too much like the Replicators from Stargate SG-1.
fodkodrasz 2mo ago
> unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider I love the phrasing, we usually call this design language as transformers mating.
- LazyGooze 2mo ago
  It looks like the deceptikon logo from above thou xD
ungreased0675 2mo ago
It would be great if more companies adopted standardized shapes like the 10” mini-rack format.

Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...

spopejoy 2mo ago

It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.

LargoLasskhyfv 2mo ago

Because otherwise the Punx don't recognize their Cyber.

ultrarunner 2mo ago

I couldn't agree more. It makes it difficult to attach my reputation to when making suggestions for hardware purchases.

jack_pp 2mo ago
if your rep depends so much on visual aesthetics then I'd say you don't have much rep to begin with. if someone trusts me they'll buy whatever I say regardless of how it looks, and likewise if I trust somebody to recommend a piece of hardware I know the aesthetics are irrelevant and they know more than I do about the specs compared to the competition.

all2 2mo ago

The WRT54 is still one of my favorite pieces of industrial design. Small case, ~~purple~~blue and grey, two antennas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series

excalibur 2mo ago
Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.
- M95D 2mo ago
  > I think you can still load OpenWRT on them Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be. The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.
- tapper 2mo ago
  Yeah me to. I hade a WRT54G V2.2 for ages. Loved that thing. Just toslow now tho.
  - ninjin 2mo ago
    As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.
bschwindHN 2mo ago
My first WiFi router :) I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
auselen 2mo ago
One could stack them.

Karliss 2mo ago

Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere. If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors. If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.

cromka 2mo ago
That complaint was about its styling, not number of antennas
buildsjets 2mo ago
Why does Wifi 5-7 require designing the case so it is shaped like an F-117 fighter jet instead of a box of candy?
- Onavo 2mo ago
  A shit ton of beam forming and phased arrays. Why do you think all of a sudden there's a bunch of "WiFi Radar Imaging" projects popping up on HN? It's not just because of advances in ML. Boost the output power by a few more magnitudes and you can probably ship them to Ukraine.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
  Because the gamers and dads who make all the purchasing decisions about household routers love F-117s, and stealth bombers, and consider fighter jets and black “Nighthawk” branding to be way sexier than a pink box of candy.
- Karliss 2mo ago
  Don't buy one which looks like that if visuals are important for you. I already told that there are plenty of models which avoids this design and form factor. Do I have to spell out specific manufacturers and models? Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design. You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers. Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP. Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms. People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality. That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff. Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend. White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.

mike_d 2mo ago

Because a modern wifi router requires a minimum of 6 antennas. 9 is even better. This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge. Do you have other ideas for how to lay it out?

MrDrMcCoy 2mo ago
My radio knowledge is not up to par, but couldn't a phased array antenna setup allow for friendlier form factors?
- nine_k 2mo ago
  But usually it is a phased-array setup, or it seems to be, with a row of antennas. Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.
ssl-3 2mo ago
Some 3-band wifi 7 AIO routers that resemble neither spiders, nor trash cans: https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7 https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7 https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-mesh-systems/asus-zenwifi/asus-zenwifi-bt10/ https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...
- mike_d 2mo ago
  The Mikrotik HAP have terrible coverage, and the other two are the hallmark trashcan design I mentioned.

HumblyTossed 2mo ago

Right? I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.

bloqs 2mo ago

Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing

cduzz 2mo ago

I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them. And they don't look fugly. It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.

burner420042 2mo ago
Documentation for how to set these up without the cisco control platform being present is hard to come by. You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.
- cduzz 2mo ago
  Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such. That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features... Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for. It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones. Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
  - vdm 2mo ago
    LLMs are great at checking logs and tweaking these clis in a logged in ssh tmux pane
  - Rediscover 2mo ago
    About the Nintendo Switch 2: Maybe try perusing https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/solution_wlan_does_not_connect_to_switch_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/sol... Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).

nine_k 2mo ago

The spider look comes from multiple antennas. Multiple antennas are needed for beamforming [1]; they represent a minimal phased array. [1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-explained-how-it-makes-wireless-communication-faster.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...

cduzz 2mo ago
It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders. But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
- d3Xt3r 2mo ago
  > and they look like UFOs not alien spiders. I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.
  - nine_k 2mo ago
    Ah, these so-called SciFi routers.
  - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    It is rather disturbing to me that WiFi routers already look too much like the Replicators from Stargate SG-1.

fodkodrasz 2mo ago

> unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider I love the phrasing, we usually call this design language as transformers mating.

LazyGooze 2mo ago
It looks like the deceptikon logo from above thou xD

ungreased0675 2mo ago

It would be great if more companies adopted standardized shapes like the 10” mini-rack format.