I mean, if they had good mesh WiFi capabilities then it’d be an easy way to steal some market share from TPlink and Google and the like. “Just buy a HomePod AND you get these other benefits”.
I picked up 4 AirPorts for $10 each a couple summers ago. They still work great even though I get warnings about weak security.
I have a couple of those old Airports gathering dust somewhere. They were replaced by mesh routers that worked infinitely better.
If they want to head back into the router game, they’ll also want to throw in some BLE, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Matter support (with mesh repeaters) to act as universal bridges to home automation.
I don’t know. I think they’d actually want to create their own standard that no one else uses and call it innovative.