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