If you have one of these Snow Apple Airport Base stations you may have noticed that newer versions of the Apple Airport Utility do not support the older base stations. And older versions of the Base Station Utility won’t launch on newer macs. Here’s how to fix this problem and still use your old base station with a newer Macintosh computer.
The problem.
- More recent versions of the Apple Airport utility don’t support older AirPort base stations. An error message appears that says ‘This version of AirPort Utility doesn’t support this base station.’

2. You might think ‘That’s fine, I’ll just use the old Apple Airport Utility’. But Apple have broken the older AirPort Utility 5.6.1. The Utility shows up as having a white line over it and won’t launch. If you try to launch it on any OS X newer than ‘Mavericks’ you just get an error saying ‘You can’t use this version of the application Airport utility 5.6.1 with this version of Mac OS.’

The Fix
Now it turns out that the old version of AirPort Utility works perfectly. It’s just been ‘disabled’ by Apple so it won’t launch.
Thanks to these guys, there’s an Applet that will launch the older version of AirPort Utility in newer versions of OS X. It simply tricks the computer into thinking you have an older version of OS X when it launches the AirPort Utility.

You can download the launcher from here.
The result is as follows – you can now change the settings on your older Apple AirPort Extreme using Airport utility 5.6.1.
This still works as of OS X High Sierra. (OS X 10.13.5)
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