Summary: If you care about wireless networking, avoid the Apple Titanium at all costs

The Details: It's not often I get to eat my words so soon and publicly, but here goes:

Before I had suggested that Apple might be breaking out of its box by successfully creating a branded packaging position. Seemed reasonable. I'd coughed up about twice the no-name prioe for an MP3 player (iPod) and 802.11 access point (AirPort) and found the ease of use a reasonable trade for the money each time. They seemed to be making smart decisions with OS X. So, with end of (tax) year approaching, I decided to spend some of my ill-gotten gains on a new laptop, and trundled down to the Palo Alto store and laid out over $3K for a 1GHz 15" Titanium.

Mistake. You see, the idea behind branded packaging is that you're making an implicit promise to the customer to not only provide the basics, but some pleasure and value above it. In the case of the Titanium, it doesn't even do the first, should you happen to care about 802.11 networking. Having been a happy owner of an Airport enabled Graphite iBook (even I can't break 'em) for a few years, I'd gotten used to the idea that Apple knew how to do wireless. I rather enjoyed surfing while sitting in bed, and got to rely on a solid connection at my home office. Well, it turns out that where my old iBook ran rock solid for hours, 20' from the AP, my brand new Titanium has a hard time keeping the signal meter more than 1/4 up, and dumps connection every 30 second to 5 minutes. (That just does wonders with Radio, by the way, it seems to have a real allergy to have its IP connection severed, and maybe re-DHCPed.)

So why are things this way? That cute titanium case, that's also called a Faraday shield, it blocks RF. And apperently Apple decided to save a buck and not have an external wire antenna hidden up around the LCD or somewhere else. Instead you get two cheesy little 'windows' in the side of the box, and can enjoy the experience of operating an RF field and multipath detector in the shape of a computer.

So after a rainy weekend afternoon going bats with connection drops while trying to hack templates, I decided to take advantage of Presidents' day and go back to the Palo Alto store and try and get some satisfaction. There I ran into a helpful employee (who will go nameless) who was honest enough to tell me that such problems were common with this Titanium, gave me a few of the gruesome details, and said that those who were serious about wireless networking were buying 3d party cards with external antennas. (Hmmm, I could have sworn the spec sheet on this said it was actually capable of doing 802.11b out of the box? ) No thanks at all to the store manager, Daniel Kang, who gave me the royal run-around and finally refused a refund or any other form of make-good because I was a couple of weeks later than the policy guidelines. Since I can't get my money back, I guess I'll soon join the Dell users with a cute little feeler antenna peeking out my PC slot - so much for packaging.

So there it ends. Fool me once, you don't get a second chance; I'm not coughing up twice the going for products I can't trust to meet simple and reasonable expectations. After eight years as an Apple employee, and 17 years as a Mac user, I'm ready for a new platform. Between a botched product engineering decision, misrepresentative advertising, and a sales channel that knows it has problems and doesn't want to face them, Apple has blown that many years of good will. Phil Schiller, call your office, you have problems out here.

So where next? I'm certainly not spending more time and money on migrating to OS X software or learning the environment. Fortunately, the Classic setup seems pretty stable, so I can keep running my old dogs for now. It seems so pathetic to plan a move to Windoze on the next box. Anyone out there tried Linux on one of these? It won't make the Airport work, but at least I can get up to speed for the jump to the next thing.
4:48:57 PM    

Wow, just go read this! Let's hope against hope that it's a spreading meme. More comments to follow after reflection.

Via Doc Searls
10:02:25 AM    

Kevin Marks has posted a set of very nice experimental power law graphs that tend to support suggestions made in this blog. In addition to weblogs, he shows movies and newspapers, each exhibiting the type of truncation of the power series due to commercial feasibility that I forecast would result production costs and limits on distribution access. Then he takes on the blog distribution, and it does indeed follow the power law, with some problems due to the truncation of the sample at far less than the total number of blogs. The very interesting additional step is to sum up the number of in-bound links across each rank category of blog; it turns out that the links to the less known blogs outnumber those to the big dogs.

Cautions: This is still static link analysis. While I'd guess the dynamic traffic comparisons would be similar, that's unproven yet. Second, this is still dumping all the blogs into one big heap, rather that doing any discrimination by topic and audience. Hmmm.... Guess the Google guys will have all that raw data to play with real soon now. How much is insight worth?
9:52:07 AM