Tonight I installed a new dual-band Airport Extreme base station. I have been having problems with the older Airport Extreme non-dual-band since moving out to G-Town and setting up digs in this apartment I tend to call home. So the opportunity presented itself for me to upgrade to a dual-band system and I jumped on it.
In my sprawling apartment complex, just based on what I can see from the drop down menu, there are 15 (sometimes more) WiFi networks within 150 feet of where I'm sitting right now. Tell me there's no interference from that!
So I went for the dual-band WiFi base station, hoping that I can out-fox all the other folks using primitive gear. Now the slower, less critical WiFi can support the iPhones and the media centers while the more robust WiFi can support actual work on actual machines (assuming I do any actual work, of course).
So that's all well and good, but when I plugged in the new base station, I ran the Airport Utility program to set it up and lo, I didn't have a recent enough version. It seems the new base station wanted version 5.5 and I only had 5.4.2 on my shiny new (huge) iMac.
That's not too weird in and of itself. Often updates come out after machines ship but before people get them into their hands. The weird part is that I checked Apple's website and sure enough, the most recent version was the one I already had installed.
So I did something that I have never done, not one single time in the past 10 years of owning Macintosh OS X products: I installed the software that came with the product in the box.
Way back before there was an OS X, we learned that sometimes installers downgraded system components, so I got into the habit of never using the disk in the box. The reasoning goes that whatever software has been sitting in the box at Best Buy for months can't possibly be as up to date as the software installed over the web from Apple's software update application.
So anyway, all the Mac die-hards out there are all having a collective gasp right now, while all the windows users are saying "so what's the big deal, you can install software."
This is the first time since 2000 that it didn't "just work" by plugging it in.
For shame Apple. Are you growing too fast? Did you outsource this one? is there some reason why Airport Utility 5.5 hasn't been made available for the masses?
I felt like I was using a Microsoft product for a few minutes.
Of course, 10 minutes later when I had a dual-band WiFi base station up and running and supporting 3 machines and an iPhone, the Apple-love returned and I quietly put the CD away. Yes, it only took 10 minutes, and that includes an SMS conversation that I was having with my hubby at the same time.
