It's Rarely Good to Be Proved a Psychic

From today's MacHome HotTips newsletter:

AIRPORT CARD QUANDARY REVISITED
Q: How can I go wireless with my iBook? Apple no longer sells the standard AirPort Card--just AirPort Extreme--so what do I do? What all do I need and about what should I expect to pay? My school is wireless and if I can add wireless capability, it would be a big help. -- Marcia Boone

A: You're right -- Apple is no longer selling the original AirPort Card. This has left thousands of would-be-wireless users out in the cold. There are some USB-based alternatives such as D-Link's Wireless USB Adapter ($45; http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=175/ ) that will do the job. Still, the AirPort Card remains the single best way to go wireless with an iBook. Unfortunately, the only sure source for the standard AirPort Card is eBay, where they're now going for about $100-$125. This is a heavy premium to pay for the card--it had been selling for $79 before its discontinuation--but you may find that you have little choice in the matter.

I've been expecting this ever since Apple first introduced the AirPort Card. Apple has a reputation for creating proprietary cards and connectors that fit its design philosophy but leave users out in the cold when that philosophy changes. AirPort was exactly that: It was not a PC Card, like most other wireless cards for notebooks, and so it was only available from Apple. The slot, the only card expansion slot in iBooks, can't be used for anything else.

Computers equipped with regular AirPort (802.11b) slots were still being sold by Apple not all that long ago. Only a year ago, I know you could such Macs new. Where does this leave all the people who bought those computers figuring they might upgrade to a wireless card withing the three to five years they expected to use the computer? For some, their computers' warranties haven't even expired, and the machine is already more than obsolete.

Of course, Apple isn't offering computers so behind the times now. All its computers are capable of faster wireless, peripheral and computing speeds than those older iBooks. But that's not necessarily better, since its current wireless connectivity solution is yet another proprietary card, and the kicker is that it's a different size than the original AirPort cards, which means they don't fit in the slots built into slightly older Macs. Now, if you had a PC notebook or even a PowerBook and Netgear or some other company discontinued the 11-mbps wireless card you were planning to buy, you could buy Netgear's 56-mbps card instead without a problem (except maybe for the bigger hit to your wallet). It would still work.

I'm more embittered I guess because I've seen it happen many times. Of course, I already have a wireless card in my iBook, so I'm safe (assuming it doesn't stop working, especially since the warranty's expiring). But in our first Mac, a Performa desktop, we had a "communications" slot, which was the only internal expansion slot available. You needed a special Apple communications card to use it, which I believe was just an internal modem. However, by the time I discovered this slot, you couldn't buy cards for it anymore (except used ones). And we had an external modem anyway. But what if Apple had just given us a standard expansion-card slot rather than this wacky one? I'm sure we could have found something to put in that would have extended the life or usefulness of that computer. Much like giving iBook users a PC Card slot would have been more advantageous than giving them a proprietary slot and then discontinuing the only thing they can put in it.

If Apple's going to continue to offer proprietary wireless solutions, they ought to do the right thing and install the hardware into every notebook it sells. Even Intel doesn't require you to buy a separate card to take advantage of antennas built into Centrino notebooks.