I do the same for my parents, but I stopped buying Airport routers a while ago. The reason I did has nothing to do with Apple or a deficiency in the product and everything to do with my parent's broadband provider. The broadband modems they rent out suck. And because my parents have pets, the modems die regularly. And when they do, they can't just send a replacement unit, they have to send a technician out.

I handle all the phone support and leave my mom a script for when the repair person comes and in both I'm making sure that the replacement unit is a simple modem and not a combination modem/router that they like to give out. And yet each and every time, if I'm not personally present when the technician visits, I find that the technician set up the combo router and the nice, expensive Airport is sitting idly by, useless until I can figure out how to make their PoS combo router operate as a bridge, which isn't easy considering how poor the web UIs are on those boxes. After repeating this process many times, I gave up on buying stand-alone routers...it's just too frustrating.

So if my mom, who has a techie son who knows the difference between a modem and a router, can't reliably get her broadband provider to give her a simple modem without router functionality, what are the chances that other people with her level of acumen who don't have a son like me can get them to do it? I never like to generalize my own experience to explain larger trends, but I think in this case it might be apt. I imagine Apple has trouble with Airports from the broadband companies pushing their own inferior solution to people who don't understand enough to push back. Apple probably has a lot of angry feedback from people who don't realize that the Airport they paid a bunch of money for is sitting unused next to a crappy, inferior box that has been setup and connected to their internet, which is actually the box causing the problems.