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TiBook Wi-Fi Range Hack: New Card
eggboard writes "Apple likes the profit margins on its internal AirPort card (still $100 three years after introduction), but the Faraday cage that is the Titanium PowerBook keeps the AirPort card and the TiBook's internal antenna from achieving the same range as the plastic-cased white dual-USB iBooks. Wired News reports today on Cliff Skolnick et al's hack, which is simply to use a 200 mW PC Card coupled with OS X-compatible drivers. The cost winds up less than an AirPort Card, and you can get a model with an external antenna jack, too."
Buying a WiFi card and installing drivers is a hack? mmmmmk.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Goodness knows that Macs command a premium on their hardware, but that's because all their official Apple Hardware has been thoroughly tested and debugged against the various OSii. King Jobs rules a stern and strict kingdom, but at least you get stability.
In contrast, if you start sticking commodity PC hardware in their with poorly tested drivers, yeah, you may save a few bucks, but you lose a lot of stability, your TiBook may no longer be capable of multiday uptimes.
Here's a little experiment, go to any Mac forum and read up on hardware/software bugs, you'll find that 70% of them have been due to poorly designed third party software. Jobs may be greedy, but he also wants you have to the best, most reliable software out there.
Seriously dude. I work for Johns Hopkins, and a small sect (used politely, of course!) of us are Mac loyalists...we've done this already. Its not news, except it involves Macs, and OS X. (the default aiport driver worked with the Orinoco cards, as I recall)
I'm the network admin for a school, and Apple tech support REFUSES to talk to you if you've got anything "non-stock" in the machine! What kind of crap is that? I installed a RAID 1 card in my boss's machine, (since he's already had one hard drive failure) and 6 months later his mainboard goes bad....apple wouldn't talk to me until I removed the RAID card and put back the factory hard drive.
Needless to say, that didn't fix the mainboard problem. Then to add insult to injury, Apple wouldn't send me a replacement board (like Dell and Gateway do). I had to take the thing to a local service shop! Apple services it's machines like they are microwaves, or VCRs.....ARRRGH!
Can you imagine Dell or Gateway refusing to troubleshoot problems with you because you've installed a new internal peripheral (i.e network adapter, video card, sound card...etc)?
No wonder corporate america stays away from these things....the support is awful.
-ted
HP won't help you because you're out of warranty, IBM won't help you because they didn't make the printer OR your modem, USR says everything is fine, AOL won't help you unless you reinstall Windows from scratch and THEN install AOL 8.0...
It's called PASSING THE BUCK
Having integrated wireless is so nice: you just open the lid and it's on; close the lid and it's off. Nothing to insert or remove; nothing to type, nothing to click.
Also, for the record, the later model TiBooks improved the wireless reception (I have a spanking new 800 MHz model). I get reception virtually as good as my Lombard got (at least for all the places I do wireless). Only once was it slightly worse. But in my house, cafe, and at work, the base station isn't far so it's not an issue.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The problem with Mac fanboys is they take PR as fact. Steve Jobs doesn't care about software reliability, he cares about make profits.
I have no doubt that he cares about both. Part of what powers the Steve Jobs reality distortion field is the he exudes a belief in what he's doing... the attention to detail, the aesthetics of the computing experience. It isn't an afterthought. Steve isn't always right, but it's really easy to believe he's trying to do The Right Thing (TM).
Illustrative quote: "the problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste" ie, they don't really care about the user experience (and note when I say here that user experience is not just about pretty UI, it's about easy of system administration, and power to do what you'd like to do) except as an afterthought. Whereas Apple has often been concerned with -- even passionate about creating a product they thought was done right.
Maybe I'm hypnotized by a mind ray. But I think that what it comes down to is that while Apple has to and is therefore concerned about profits and smart business, Apple is also headed by and made up mostly of craftsmen, while most other computing companies are headed by and made up of businessmen. Is there any way to prove this? I don't know. But their presentation has a more honest smell. And I find their products to be of a higher quality than the alternatives.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Or VESA Local Bus, EISA, Microchannel, 486sx, SIPPs, Hercules, CGA, EGA, 8514a. And as a more modern example: iLink (as a stupid firewire name). Different architectures have different hardware needs and implementations. Just 'cause none (exception:FireWire) of your examples ever showed up on a PC, doesn't mean that the PC world isn't guilty of the same crimes.
Pot... Kettle... Black
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
All of it, since if you want a Mac, you can only buy it from Apple. It doesn't matter that they've switched to pc-like hardware. It's still a proprietary system.
Vote for Pedro
My University uses Cisco LEAP to keep unauthorised people off their wireless network. PCs work with Cisco cards, and MacOS X 10.[12] work with internal Airport cards.
When it asks for your password, just use , and it works. Can you do this with a cheap card and drivers?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
>Or VESA Local Bus, EISA, Microchannel, 486sx, SIPPs, Hercules, CGA, EGA, 8514a.
All of these are backwards compatible, though.
VLB and EISA support ISA cards. MCA was proprietary and died before it got off the floor like it should have. 486sx? That supported all 386 and 486 software. SIPPs, I'm told, worked fine as SIMMs if you removed the legs (not to mention I've only EVER had one mobo that used them -- they died like they should have too!). All those video standards you talk about are FULLY supported by all modern VGA controllers. Not to mention many of those controllers themselves were backwards compatible. And that they were all fully documented -- so much so they were copied successfully by numerous companies.
>Different architectures have different hardware needs and implementations.
Yes. But PCs are fully documented, and when there's already a set standard for something, they don't break compatability for that standard. The standard DIMM was 3.3v, but Apple chose to ignore the standard, costing users money and time. This goes for many of those items. Motorized eject disk drives are something I've only ever seen on a Mac. Same with localtalk and NuBus.
At least (I'm told) ISA was intended to be easy for an S100 bus designer to adapt to...
Maybe the difference is that when a proprietary standard is introduced into the PC world, it dies almost instantly, no matter how much howling and bawling IBM does. Whereas in the Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field, proprietary standards are forced down users throats until Steve Jobs' decides they suck. Not to mention the documentation thing again, as well.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Apple introduced that ejecting floppy drive (3 1/2") back when PCs were still using 5 1/4" 360K floppy disks. Now that PC's have non-ejecting 3 1/2" drives, the Apple move looked strange. But back then it was innovative, and probably because of that you have these drives in PC's today. Apples response now is to get rid of floppies altogether. The PC world is still apparently scratching their collective heads trying to come up with a decent, universal floppy replacement: CDR, Zip, USB dongle or other flash media, LS120, CDs, etc.
VLB was proprietary, I never saw it on anything but PC's. EISA is apparently on life support, the 486sx and 386sx were crude hacks, lets not forget those other great chips by Cyrix and other failed Intel CPU clone manufacturers. Warts like these are commonplace, and proprietary hardware standards do fail, I only wish proprietary software protocols would fail as well.
Now if you want to complain about Apple OEM CDROM and hard drives that would work on a Mac, but the cheaper OEM drives without the Apple name would not without 3rd party software/hacks, then you have a good point. However, PC companies *cough* Compaq *cough* did odd things like this with their hardware as well.
I think most PC manufacturers (and Apple) are a bit older and wiser now.
Apple doesn't do any of this OEM crap now. Their system is more "open" than it ever has been before. Yes, the case isn't an ATX case, but who cares? It has SDRAM/DDRAM, AGP/PCI, USB, FireWire, 10/100/1G Ethernet. On the software side they have TCP/IP, and any other "UNIX" protocol. It plays Quicktime, Windows Media, Realvideo, MP3, MPEG1, Divx and others. Yes, they have that funky video connector, but that can be fixed with a cheap cable if you don't like Apple's monitor offerings. There are other computer platforms that have proprietary buses, interfaces, memory and protocols but you don't neccessarily see their users bitching every day about it.
Note that I am a recent addition to the Mac community, and not particularly a fan of Apple after the Apple II and before OS X. In fact, I was a critic - I can't stand the "classic" MacOS and wasn't fond of their early PowerPC hardware. I see your point, I just don't believe Apple isn't any more or less guilty than the PC world. Mac users and PC users each live in their own "fishbowls"- anything outside their comfortable little worlds are both strange and frightening to them.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit