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."

Comments

Hack?

[TotallyUseless]

Buying a WiFi card and installing drivers is a hack? mmmmmk.

Cheaper, but you lose stability

[Hairy_Potter]

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.

Re:Cheaper, but you lose stability

[pla]

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.

First, I do not mean this as an anti-Mac troll, so please don't take it as such.

The fact that the OS loses stability when running 3rd party software does NOT say much for the quality of its own engineering. *Anyone* can write a standalone app suite that, under ideal conditions (ie, a vanilla W2K install and just the app suite running) will seem rock-solid.

In the real world, however, hundreds or even thousands of different software packages, most from different developers, must occupy the same physical machine. A decent OS *MUST* acknowledge that and not only deal with, but *expect*, poor behavior on the part of its apps. Not every app returns a meaningful value, not every app completely frees its memory, not every app releases all the hardware it asked to use. None of those "should" happen, but especially when a program crashes, they *do* happen. The OS has to figure out a way to clean up no matter what a user-space program does.

No, I don't intend to say that any one OS does a whole lot better (cough, cough, Linux, cough), but I would not consider "stability under ideal conditions" a big selling point.

Anything non-stock is a "hack" according to apple.

[zerofoo]

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

Re:Apple will lose profits not stability

[namespan]

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.

Cisco LEAP?

[dadragon]

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?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Apple will lose profits not stability

[rworne]

Ah, yes. But just because a standard is on the PC, does not make it a standard for the Mac world. What is standard in the Mac world also is not necessarily a standard for PCs. Memory costs are pretty much a function of supply and demand, the lower supply of 5v RAM means higher costs. Macs even then were a fraction of the PC marketshare.

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.