Unifi is simple and reliable, other options are available I’m sure. I don’t have Apple products but unifi seem to be the WiFi equivalent when it comes to simplicity. I would never get a dream machine due to obscene cost, so have a second hand cloud key. Same box does my unifi security cameras - quality is good enough, but for a lot less money, better resolution cameras are out there.
To report back:
I found a deal on eBay for 2x Mikrotik HAP AC2 - $98 shipped for the pair. Fantastic price!
Plan is to have 1 act as firewall/router, switch & AP- the other will not perform any routing and will simply serve as a switch & AP. Unclear if I’ll need a 3rd access point or not (I have not been to this home yet)- I’ll cross that bridge later.
Planning to setup & install at some point in Jan and plan to share the experience with MikroTik.
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Consumer devices support roaming, but it’s jank. Asus and Netgear have APs that allow for meshing and / or wiring up and roaming. No experience with the former (because vulnerabilities keep getting discovered in them, although they have the best feature-set hands-down among all consumer routers, unless you go OpenWRT) and my room mates had Netgear APs, but they weren’t the best (at least signal quality wise).
Nothing wrong with going AX, the APs will support AC spec’ed clients. And AX will probably be felt when they finally upgrade to AX-capable computers.
I am planning to replace the netgear we have at this home with Belkin routers running OpenWRT. I did the groundwork, got 1 router, installed openwrt on it flawlessly. The one I got is RT3200, a.k.a. AX3200, a.k.a. Linksys E8450. The Belkin is around $50, the Linksys is between $90 and $120. The only difference between them is that the belkin doesn’t have LED status indicators (which I don’t need anyway).
This was the only WiFi AX capable router that could run OpenWRT and thus far it’s been behaving great. If only not for some shipping misfortune during black Friday, I would’ve already had the setup complete.
The nice thing about OpenWRT is that you can just mishmash the routers later on when you upgrade and they’ll all be running the same OS. The not so nice thing is that (AFAIK) there’s no way to manage a fleet of them at the same time without some fancy automation (which for something that basically never changes settings, no point in doing anyway, unless you plan to change the wifi password every month).
Running routers in AP mode might not be the most efficient use, but it sure is cheaper than getting dedicated AP and a dedicated router. With 4 of these (with 1 serving as router and AP and 3 just as AP), you can cover a whole large house in radiowaves for about $200.
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The only major downside with the RT3200 seems to be that range isn’t great. From previous experience builtin antennas performs quite a bit worse than external (multiple platforms and brands). It would also be preferable to have a tri-radio solution so you could use one radio for linking.