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Apple Rolls Out AirPort Express, AirTunes
das writes "Apple has introduced AirPort Express (specs), a palm-sized, portable 802.11g base station with 10/100 ethernet, USB printer sharing, and analog and optical audio output, for connection to a stereo system or powered speakers for streaming your music collection via 'AirTunes.' It supports multiple profiles for easy use at multiple locations It can plug directly into the wall as a "power brick", or use a longer power cord, similar to the newer PowerBook AC adapters. AirTunes requires iTunes 4.6, expected to be available soon."
APPLE makes this to work with APPLE products. There is no law that says they have to make it completely open and work with everything. It works on a PC(w/iTunes) as well from what I've read so what's the big deal.
there is none, except someone making it a big deal. It does exatly what it says it does, plays a playlist to your stereo without a line connection to it. Nothing more, Nothing less. For the money this is probably one of the better solutions out there.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Nonsense. This is a $130 base station. It has every feature that home users use from the AirPort Extreme base station for a lot less money. The audio features are pure gravy.
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Right, remember all the drawbacks to the "lame" iPod? Everyone said it was doomed from the start. Please.
-HJ
the FP is a tool, this isnt a audio device, its a WIRELESS device with audio capabilities....
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
You can do that, so long as the machine in the closet is running iTunes and sharing it's local music library. That's the beauty of this device... 802.11g, Rendezvous (ZeroConf), and the iTunes protocol are integrated in it.
People that use iTunes and iPods have long requested a simple way to stream music to stereos no matter where they are.
Those tiny white earbuds become tiny white pains in the ass if used for any period of time, and I like to hear the phone ring while I'm working.
You can bet your tail this device is only the beginning and can probably offer hints to the next iPod revision: wireless and remote-control modes.
Apple finally has a respectful user-base and they'll do anything they can to keep it for as long as possible.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Really. Until now, the offerings on remote stereo hookups were fe and far between. I just set one of my clients up with one. It was cheap. It worked. But it sure can't act as a bridge. This is going to save a lot of people a lot of money. Previously, you had to buy another Airport Extreme for $100+ to create a bridge. Now, only $30 and you get the benefit sharing your printer and iTunes wherever the hell you want. Brillant! (To borrow the word fromthe new Guiness commercials)
Look at it this way, you have an xbox/ps2 that you want to get online and have also been looking for an easy way to listen to your iTunes music on your stereo. For $129 you get a bridge that will allow you to get your console online and an audio out to pipe into your stereo.
I paid close to $100 for a POS NetGear bridge a while back and it's only a b not g device.
Sounds reasonable. I don't see myself getting one, but that doesn't mean I think it's a watse of money/time and Apple should be slapped for making it.
Why users of iTMS? I've been using iTunes since the beginning, have 80 GBs of music, and have nver used iTMS.
And I am not locked in. I can use the app on Mac or PC... I can interact with the store contents on the Web using various tools to read the XML.
Why would Apple release a product to help Napster? Of course, it should work with their product. The same way third-parties try to support all options... Corporations try to support their products.
One thing I think your also forgetting is that the Airport Express also acts as a wireless base station. I'll probably pick this up because it's a small box that can easily be plugged into the wall and used to extend my wireless range. The fact that it can also share printers and play music makes it even better.
MP3 is a defacto open standard.
AAC is an open standard.
Perhaps you're confused with Apple's DRM they layer on top of AAC?
I get the feeling Apple designed it as a wireless AP that can serve audio or share a USB printer, whichever the users want, rather than as a device for people who have a printer next to their stereo.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Why can't it have a 56k modem built in? That would be a great little device to take with you on trips.. Land lines are generally available everywhere but wireless or LAN isn't. What might also work is if there was a way to plug a USB modem into the USB port (that's supposed to be for printer sharing) and have the unit use that modem..
.02.
Although it is nice that it can automagically act as a wireless bridge.
Just my
Geoffeg
Why would I want a hard drive and an interface? I have a big hard drive in my Power Mac, why should I duplicate all of my music on some MP3 network device and my Power Mac? Why would I want to manage music in 2 places? If I rip a new CD why would I want to add it to the MP3 device too?
This device is half the price of what you mention and it acts as a wireless access point as a side benefit of streaming music. This is perfect for most users. The remote could be an issue, but you can control this with any laptop with iTunes and play the music from a desktop in another room on the speakers in your room. You can also use any of the new bluetooth equipped phones to remote control iTunes. I use the Salling Clicker on my T616 to control iTunes all the time. Hopefully apple will make a remote device soon that uses 802.11b and has a small LCD, I'm sure they will before too long, and if they don't I'm sure a few other companies will.
-matt
http://thewonderllama.com
It's an access point for all those hotels with wired connections. Now you can get pr0n on the road in the bed without having an ethernet cord to get in your, um, "escort's" way!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
But there is no remote or display for the AirTunes, so I can't control things without going to the computer. I can use Bluetooth (my Belkin adapter has a 100 ft. range) and my Palm Tungsten T... hmmm. But I still don't get a playlist display. Can't change the playlist that's currently on, either.
I could buy a Keyspan remote... but a 40 ft. range and RF is not the best way to go, IMHO.
Why do I see a small" iTablet" in Apple's future? About the size of a Palm, stylus or touch controlled, with the ability to pick up shared iPhoto libraries and to control AirTunes wirelessly? Maybe even include some of the Newton's handwriting recognition since Mac OS X has the Inkwell technology in place...
I think AirTunes is a Apple putting their toe in the water to see what feedback they get. The PDA/tablet rumors may actually be tied more to the digital hub than to actual portable computing...
Keep It Simple Stupid...
The target audience for this product is a Mac user... people are typically drawn to Mac for it's "it just works" image (which has been dilluted lately).
This seems like a very Mac way to get these functions done... via your existing familiar itunes interface you can play songs on your home stereo w/o a wire from your PC to the stereo.
It also eliminates a router for people who don't use wired devices.
With this less-then-a-typical-brick sized device you can put your cable modem and printer in/on a desk, and hook up your stereo too. Then your Mac's around the house can print, share files, connect to the net and play music on the stereo...
Apple definiately did their homework for this one...
Cool gadget...
I've been doing this in more kludgy ways with
wifi laptops hooked up to stereos. This just makes it very nice,easy, and convenient. Always a distinction for Apple stuff.
As for no display or remote, that's kinda moot.
Most people with wifi have a laptop in front of them and can see what's playing.
Imagine,if the next gen iPods are wifi, then it'll be just like having a remote and being able to see/change your songs without wandering into the computer room.
Anyone, see future video coming down the pipe
on one of these from your centralized movie collection on your mac/pc?
Maybe an iTheater app?
It looks like Apple is making another foray into the PC market. First they adopted USB, replacing the old ADB, automatically making PC USB peripherals Mac-compatible by default at the hardware level. Then they came out with the PC-compatible iPod. Then they produced the PC version of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. Now this.
I really see this as being a great product for sharing the audio on your laptop and playing it on a friend's stereo. But this device doesn't even come close to what a slimp3 or a Roku Soundbridge can do.
One thing missing from this device is a real optical out. I'm sorry but going analog mini jack -> digi optical doesn't make any sense.
Firstly, no self-respecting audio professional would use a wireless connection of any kind for critical listening. It's well-shielded, unidirectionally (or bi-directionally) grounded cabling, and fiber optics where applicable.
If you are serious about audio, you're going to use the optical interface, in which case your receiver's DAC is doing all the work.
If you're really serious about audio, you're not going to be doing any of your critical listening through any computer player software like iTunes, WinAMP, or what have you... If you're like me, even raw 16-bit PCM is unacceptable for critical listening. In fact, I went back and digitally remastered my last solo album in 24-bit PCM DVD Audio, and plan to produce all future releases in that format and nothing else.
As much as I love MPEG-4 AAC, anything you have stored as MPEG-4 AAC, MP3, LAME, WMA, Ogg Vorbis or any other multimedia codec short of 24-bit uncompressed AIFF/WAV, is not sufficient enough quality to warrant complaints about the DAC in the Airport Express.
In short, if you're streaming music through a computer and it's not 16- or 24-bit PCM, a DAC is the least of your worries.
On the issue of whether the optical interface supporrts 5.1, 7.1, etc. An optical interface will support whatever's being digitally streamed through it. Whether it's Dolby ProLogic, Dolby Digital 2.0, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS, DTS-ES, etc. all depends on your OS and the application from which the music is being streamed.
Everyone's fixated on music, but the best thing for us road warriors is it's a mobile access point. I can bring it around and use the hotel's wired access wirelessly from my room. And it's tiny and light, so it won't load me down -or- take up a lot of space in the laptop bag.
If you've never been on the road, you don't know how much of a pain it is to be stuck to the crappy desks most hotels have. Go wireless!
You can also (with a y-cable) attach it to the in-room TV, so you can ditch those annoyingly-heavy travel speakers. Yahoo!
Need to enable wireless in a conference room really quick? Plug in one of these puppies, and bang, you're ready to go. You can even configure the drop in the conference room as not connected to the inside net, allowing instant ad-hoc outside access.
It's also something else: a security nightmare for IT. Imagine the problem IT had with unauthorized modems. Now you can have rogue access points the size of a pack of cards hiding out somewhere in your organization. You'd never find the freaking thing.
What a neato gadget!
What's needed now is something that looks and works like an iPod, but is actually an RF remote control for AirTunes...
You mean, like an iBook?
to the specs posted -- "AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network. " -- translation - if you want to use this for wireless iTunes streaming, then you will need to also have purchased an Apple airport in order
.
could it be a CYA so as not to have to worry about supporting who-knows-what stations out there?
THe Airport Extreme is based on the broadcom chipset IIRC (it's not like Apple has their own chip fabs), and so it shares the lineage of the linksys boxes etc.; how apple extreme base stations extend wireless range is through WDS, which last I checked is not an apple proprietary system.
of course until the machines show up and someone tries it with a non-apple box (and blogs about it), we can't really be sure..
While I agree that it would be much cooler to output whatever audio is getting out of your Mac to this device, I really don't expect to see it being able to stream the audio of time sensitive applications.
Can you imagine the latencies? The sound and image would never be in sync.
No, it isn't missing that much functionality, and it has additional functionality that the Airport does not have, plus it is from a good company, Asus, and will be supported well for years. Expect many, many firmware updates, and of course it costs 1/2 the price
I think not needing a separate AC adapter is very important in terms of "functionality", quite possibly more important than things that will appear as checkboxes in the web-based management GUI.
Considering firmware upgrades as a "feature" betrays a very geek-oriented mindset that most mainstream people don't have (I personally usually fail to resist the urge to update firmware/BIOS/etc when new releases come out, but I *know* it's not normal. And don't they always say, with respect to firmware upgrades, "if it ain't broke don't fix it"?).
I love my Asus P4P800Deluxe motherboard, but it's not like they're a perfect company either. IIRC, one of their founders (fairly recently) jumped ship, releasing a statement saying that management was no longer concerned about quality etc. (does anyone have a link to the story on either The Register or The Inquirer?).
brought the 330 to a couple of the Austin wireless meetings and it was a hit
I hate to say it but if you bring your unit to a meeting and someone brings an Airport Extreme, the latter will be more popular.
Of course, from price point alone, the number of people you meet there who go on to buy a unit for themselves, there'll probably be more Asus buyers.
I would be shocked if this didn't work. It will stream the music from the desktop to the laptop, then from the laptop to the airport express and your stereo. It might not work, but it really should.
-matt
http://thewonderllama.com
First - the Asus WL-330 does not do audio playback, so it's not really a comparable product.
Second - More elegant? The thing has a f*cking wall-wart!
'nuff said.
Yes, Slashdot has proven time and time again that they understand what's Apple's doing better than Steve Jobs.
Do I REALLY need to link back to all the early postings about the iPod, about how it was tooo little too late, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, nothing new.
How about the iPod mini dicussions? About how the colors were stupid and gay looking, how little the hard drive was, how no one needed a smaller iPod, etc.?
I think there's ONE thing that has been established on Slashdot without a doubt:
YOU DONT KNOW SHIT ABOUT WHAT REGULAR PEOPLE WANT AND EVEN LESS ABOUT HOW APPLE'S PRODUCTS FIT IN, SO ******STFU****** and get on about your lives.
And I just got down.
asus probably does put out more bios updates than anyone, and apple most likely puts out LESS than anyone. That says something about both companies, but its not what you think it says. What percentage of bios updates are for new features? I'm sorry, but apple makes better products than asus by far.
DVD-Video is anywhere from 3-10MB.
Even w/o optimum connection, 11g could do this.
But most of the things you'd stream from your computer wouldn't be DVD. Players are $30 with a remote and already in the correct room.
But imagine having a wireless virtual external monitor. For presentations, iTunes visualization, and remote machine control...
As usual, Apple's onto something here.
Now, all I need is a flat big enough to *need* wireless streaming to every room as opposed to 'turn the volume up on my iTunes-connected stereo and leave the doors open'...
(Hmm, I guess I've reached the age when practicality and fiscul prudence take precedence over having the latest cool 1337 hardware. How depressing!)
You must think in Russian.
Source: Jason Snell's blog entry at MacWorld, which has more detail.
If it's not good enough for you and doesn't do what you need, don't buy it. Buy something that does. If there isn't anything else that quite does what you need, why are you bitching about Apple not providing all your products for you, especially since you probably would never buy any of their products? How you got modded up, I don't know, but Apple didn't release this saying "This is the best Hi-Fi device ever, and it plays perfect sound and it does everything you'll ever need!!! Insanely great!" Instead, they said "This will let you play music off your stereo instead of your laptop speakers without plugging it in. This will extend your wireless network's range. This will act as a wireless print server for all the computers in your house. It's easy! And cheap!" It's not a fucking high fidelity audio appliance, you tit, it's designed to make things easy and better than they would be if you were playing MP3s off your computer. And that's what it fucking does.
And no, I'm not some fanatic Apple apologist. I just dislike assholes. They make me have to yell.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Dude, you do realize that you totally sound like an ASUS shill, as well as an Apple-basher, right?
We are in a desperate race between Stupidity and Transcendance; Don't pick the wrong side.
TOSlinks only cost $3 , they could have had optical built in for less than $1 factory cost.
I think these days companies giving crap/limited ports on devices are a scam to sell expensive ass cables with adaptors at 500% profit margines for nothing more than a bit of plastic covering some copper and perhaps 1 or 2 resistors with a capacitor/transistor.
as a virtual 'make believe example';
Do the math, 500000 adaptors at $20 profit = $10m profit, when they could have spent $1 per device to have it avail by default.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Where MS talked about zero config devices, Apple has put out Rendezvous. As an IETF standard. Which means that I have tools for it. On FreeBSD. A little work in /usr/ports (like "make install" - oh that's hard), and I can play with Rendezvous devices.
One presumes that configuring it will be more towards "$Mom can do it" than the typical Windows
"Wait until a full moon; reconfigure your interrupts so the devices are found alphabetically; swing the chicken innards over the heat sync and reboot 13 times while chanting the Rolling Stones verse: 'You make a grown man cry' 13 times backwards at the stroke of midnight."
Instead, I'll suspect you'll do something like plug it in, hit it with a web browser or even iTunes 4.6 and say "find new device" and it will autoconfigure.
*I* just want to know if I can auto conf it from FreeBSD and feed it tunes from a BSD box.
Um, the Apple does WDS too.
Traffic was just awful!
Anyway, I'm sure by now that this has already been said, but it's clear that the next step will be AirPort Express with RCA A/V jacks and/or S-Video, for connection to a home theater rig-- stream your iMovies and DVDs wirelessly to your living room.
This would be an amazing move-- a suitcase nuke to Microsoft's "Fat Man" media center crapola. You wouldn't need an unwieldy PC shitting up your entertainment center-- just the same Mac you've always had, projecting its media throughout the house wirelessly via some rather unobtrusive modules. I imagine the video version would need some sort of remote.
I've seen two schools of though on the remote control issue. The first suggests using one of the third party utilities to use your bluetooth phone as an iTunes remote. The other predicts Apple will make a new hardware device.
Apple is great at coming up with new things on their own, and while they have in times past had alot of "not invented here syndrome" they seem to have gotten over it. Perhaps they'll adopt the Bluetooth phone remote concept themselves. A couple of standard utilities, dev library, and good AppleScript support would be pretty neat.
~Lake