Like I mentioned earlier - I'm not really surprised - it's been quite some time since any product refreshes - The Extreme AC/Time Capsule date back to 2013, and the Airport Express is around the same time... not even a size bump on the storage within the TimeCapsule.
I honestly don't think many people were working on the Airports - and Bloomberg didn't say the Airports were cancelled, just that the few team members that were working on Airport have been reassigned to other projects - which Apple has done in the past, moving folks from OSX over to iOS (and then back and forth from there)...
Perhaps they'll be working on something like HomeKit hub or another iteration of the Apple TV - HomeKit hasn't really taken off, and perhaps this is due to not enough resources behind that initiative - and that hub could have routing/wifi capability as part of that - who knows?
(Maybe they're working on the Apple Device for Internet of Things development - see below)
(just kidding, that was a 4/1 joke from Hackaday.com -
more stuff here on that one)
The Windows Airport Utility is very old - v5.6 dates back to 2012, and even the Mac and iOS utilities are fairly dated - yes, we did see a refresh on the firmware for the 11n/11ac devices back last June, but prior to that, the only update was to address the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug...
They never integrated iCloud functionality - there's "back to my Mac", but that's actually pre-iCloud from the MobileMe days, and that functionality has been largely replaced by iCloud on the Macs anyways - it's one of those features that not very many people made use of...
There's so much they could have done - App download caching, integration with iCloud storage for near line and sync back to iCloud, that's just a couple of things off the top of my head...
The Airports had some nice features - Bonjour Sleep Proxy is very useful, having a working Wake on Wireless LAN that supports not just Macs, but Windows as well (as long as iTunes was installed, and some clever trickery done) - Time Machine support obviously, as that was much more reliable for near-line backup than what the other NAS and Router/AP vendors have tried, and then the whole MulticastDNS (Bonjour) implementation itself, which supports Airplay and Airprint fairly seamlessly...
The Express was always nice for print serving (which the Extreme also does), and of course AirTunes, which is pretty awesome in it's own right...
Guest Networking with Airports was unique in that they supported guest networking across multiple AP's - whether backhauled via ethernet or as an "extended" network over wifi - it was an enterprise level feature that was quietly put it for the 11n and later Airports.
Many of the other vendors support some of this function, but I do think this is an opportunity for them to improve, as some continue to have problems with one or more...
Sometimes I think Apple has lost a bit of focus on the customers - first with the iPhone 7 headphone jack, and now the recent MacBook Pro refresh (let's take away all the ports that people do use with Pro's (HDMI, Thunderbolt, USB-A, previously onboard ethernet/firewire/SDCard/etc... and replace them with USB-C connectors that nobody really has much of a selection - that's not "courage", that's arrogance and big misstep... at least they left the headphone jack in that one, but they removed the digital out on that jack (Macbook Pro headphone had digital audio out on that jack as well as the TRRS analog) - lot of "pro's" were pretty unhappy about that - and heck, even as a development machine for iOS, one has to buy a USBC to Lightning Cable for 20 bucks...
