Apple's Airport

Apple’s Airport is the single best computer product thing in the last half century (you know, since computers have been like around).

In yet another example of it’s utility and ease of use, I just walked into my office with a PC and an SGI Irix box on a Sunday night, plugged the main ethernet into an Airport base station, ran a cable from it to a router that has the PC and SGI machines plugged into it, spent one minute configuring the Airport via my iBook and it all works.

Took less than 5 minutes. Hell, it took longer to write this thing.

And I can go upstairs.

Still have a connection.

Outside.

Still have a connection.

See I’ve been doing this silly cable unplug-plug-unplug, not-all-three-at-the-same-time-and-IT-does-not-care, tied to my desk thing ….

·:· Posted 27 June 2005, 05:21 by Jason Hoffman to Elsewhere  |  

  1. That’s just wifi in general in the Mac (unless it’s at the Groningen University and they have this funky 802.11x thing and your connection goes down every 10 minutes), nothing to do with the overly expensive Apple wifi accesspoint/router/whatsnot-combi-microwave.

    — Marten Veldthuis    27 June 2005, 11:07    #
  2. You should, in your copious spare time, definitely also check out Apple’s Airport Express. It’s marketed mostly as a way to stream music because you can connect it to your stereo or powered speakers and play iTunes files, (all of which is good) but check it out because the Airport Express is the size of a current Apple power adapter, and so makes a wonderful portable Airport base station for up to ten simultaneous users. The software even lets you configure it for use in several different locations.

    — Lisa Spangenberg    27 June 2005, 14:43    #
  3. I love the Airport Express. Its simplicity, size and relatively low cost make it one of those groovy products that makes you look at Apple and think, “Geez, if I was that smart, I could make a meeeeelllion dollars!”

    — Nick Ryberg    27 June 2005, 18:56    #
  4. This seems as good a place (and time) as any to ask my perennial question: Does anybody know of a decent, trustworty place available to buy the old 802.11b Airport cards (for an older iBook) that won’t charge me $30 for shipping?

    — Chris Carlson    27 June 2005, 20:09    #
  5. chris,

    smalldog.com seems to have those in stock.

    is this the part?

    airport card

    their price seems pretty steep, though.

    — n8    27 June 2005, 21:32    #
  6. That’s the part, n8. It looks like I’ll pay >$100 including shipping no matter where I go. Thanks for the link!

    — Chris Carlson    28 June 2005, 12:28    #
  7. You can try MacSolutions, it’s less there.

    Hmmm . . . URL doesn’t seem to work; here it is again:

    http://www.macsolutionsinc.com/airport.html

    — Lisa Spangenberg    28 June 2005, 15:35    #