Can you replace a fan in Apple’s AirPort Extreme?

A mysterious whirring and grinding noise from his late-model AirPort Extreme Base Station disturbed one Macworld reader. Why would it make such a sound? He hadn’t turned it on for a year, but was about to reactivate it with a new broadband connection.My reply: The polite verbal equivalent of a shrug, because—I wrote—there’s no fan in an AirPort Express, and only a Time Capsule has a hard drive. Time Capsule drives certainly fail, like any spinning storage media, but the grinding described would surely have meant the drive was on its way to failure, if not already destroyed.But your faithful Mac 911 columnist failed to do his research. I own a newer AirPort Extreme—one of the “crackerbox” models that looks like a gleaming white micro-tower. It’s never made a peep. I even thought I’d even looked at pictures of the insides of this version from Apple’s now-discontinued series of routers.To read this article in full, please click here