July 23, 2004
Airport Expressions
It seems to me that if something Apple does isn't exactly perfect, the media jump all over it. I have recently been reading articles about the recently shipped Airport Express, 
a portable, 802.11g base station that not only lets you set up to 10 computers in a wireless network, but allows you to plug in a USB printer so that all the computers on your network can print to it wirelessly, and on top of that it contains technology to allow you to connect it to your home stereo and stream music (encrypted, so as to deter wireless theft) from any of your computers on the network to that stereo. All this for what, $179?
Maybe the critics are too busy picking it apart they fail to see the whole picture. It does ALL those things, in a handy little package.
Now, I realize that most "Wireless-G" base stations only cost in the neighbourhood of $89-$189. So the Airport Express does seem to be on the high end of the scale and maybe that's why the reporters expect more from it. But the articles I was reading stating that it "falls short" of expectations made me wonder what do these people actually expect?
I haven't actually tried one, so I may be a little off base here, but after trying to manage my wireless network at home using my Linksys Wireless Router with 4 port switch, I can only imagine the Airport Setup is superior and probably worth paying a little extra for. If the Airport Express was available when I bought my router (for $279 back then), it would have been a no-brainer. Even so, I'm considering buying one to replace my Linksys (I should have bought an Airport Base Station in the first place, instead of going the cheap way).
One other thing I've noticed about my router, it doesn't have a USB port or an audio jack. You wouldn't believe how difficult this makes it to play music through my stereo, although I can print with a shared printer, but that's only because OS X is so freakin' cool it lets me share my printer that is connected to my Mac which happens to be on the network.
Anyway, I get a little frustrated when I hear "experts" picking apart a product and getting all down on it when there isn't anything else out there to compare it to. If you're trying to compare it to all the other portable 802.11g wireless basestations with USB printer sharing and music streaming out there, good luck. There aren't any. And if there were, I'd bet they'd suck. People should be glad Apple is around trying to innovate otherwise we'd all be stuck using MS-DOS.