Snow Leopard, an engineering second coming? Umm, no. Will it quiet critics, please Wall Street, and satiate Mac users? Well, I guess it depends on what it’ll do for them; or, perhaps more apt, what will its perception of it do for them. What will it do for me? Well, there’ll be satisfaction in knowing that a lot of very talented people put their heart and skills into building something they care deeply about, which ultimately will make my life easier.

Now, where did I put that glass of Kool-Aid….

I live on a Mac. My sister lives on a PC.
She says “he has his brain damaged” because I do not know anything of that crap.
(And I’m the Engineer and she is the MBA!)

Ars are pretty competent, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen my AirPort Extreme behave like they reported. I have a Mac mini sitting literally right under it and there’s no trouble with its reception (although I do actually use Ethernet in preference, to keep the network clear for when I do lots of over the air file transfers to that mini, as it’s hooked up as my household server). As for long range signal strength, it reaches across the street and penetrates the “Faraday cage” of the garaged car too. Definitely stronger than the neighbours’ .g gear. No one else has .n yet nearby.

Daniel did a much more in depth series on AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule over at AppleInsider some months back in fact. (They are very similar hardware, and I’ve been using my Extreme for Time Machine backups for months now.)

My PC networking friend meanwhile has a little generic .g router of his own. When he first got it, I had my PowerBook with me and asked if I could join his network. He started reciting “D0 3E 2B …” and I had to stop him. “WTF?” He was using WEP “because it’s more reliable than WPA” and preferred remembering a maddening hex code instead of a password.

I managed to convince him out of that, fortunately.

Boy. You get some serious training as a Windows network troubleshooter!

I do remember an Ars Technica’s (a truly good site) comparison that “included” it because of users’ complains. It was the best of the bunch… but the only thing that they claim “not good” was that, a short distances, reception was not great.
What’s the meaning of wireless if you are at “short distance” (a.k.a. connect with a cable)?

A friend of mine does travelling tech support, quite a lot of it for home users. He doesn’t even know how to configure Macs. No one in their right mind would pay his company’s fees when they can get their fix for free at the Genius Bar.

He’s shoulder deep in XP and Vista configuration nightmares every working day. Let’s say there’s money aplenty to be made from that ongoing user nightmare.

The other side of his duties is 802.11. I showed him my AirPort Extreme recently. He’d never fiddled with one of those before either… “Where’s the damn web page?”

Maybe in the PC store next door there weren’t chairs.

Maybe this guy has a problem with iTunes or QuickTime for Windows!
——–
Nope, I was sitting right next to them as he was working on it. Had something to do with not booting up right.