Apple Extreme
Apple Extreme
It’s no secret that over the last four years I have been a committed fan of the Apple Mac. Ask me what computer you should buy and the answer is easy. I still find it more of a joy to use from day to day and now get hopelessly stuck whenever ny wife asks for help with her Dell box running XP. But I am not blind to the many failings of Apple and those failings are legion. From poor or, in many cases, nonexistent documentation to software that does things the ‘Apple way’ or not at all. The documentation, or lack thereof, seems to stem from an extremely arrogant position that their stuff just works. Which would be fine if it did. But much of the time, it just doesn’t.
When my LinkSys wireless access point started to play up and it became obvious that I was going to have to replace it I decided that I would forgo the ugly little box with the plethora of flashing lights and sticky out antenna and invest in the Apple Airport Extreme base station. I mean just look at it. Simple elegance with one small green light on the front to let you know it hasn’t dozed off. But what I really liked was the ability to plug an external USB drive into it for backup and a USB printer - both of which can be shared by anyone on the network. The small little booklet basically said, plug in the cables, turn it on and like magic, it would just work. We are Apple, it said. Our stuff just works. You don’t need a troubleshooting section because nothing is going to go wrong. Just you wait and see…
And did it work? Of course it didn’t. Cabled it up without extra drive or printer, turned it on sitting net to my iMac and yes - my iMac found it. Ran the setup utility and all seemed well. Except after setting it up (correctly I might add - I know what I’m doing) the iMac lost it immediately. I wont bore you with the details of the next frustrating hour trying to work out why whatever I entered into the configuration of this damn thing it always ended up telling me it’s IP address was 10.0.0.1 which ain’t what my network uses. The answer was in an update to the software that had only been released the day before. Download that and then it all worked. So it was a god job I didn’t try and set this thing up four weeks ago when I actually bought it as it would have been flattened by now on the road outside after having thrown it through my window.
My wife’s Dell however refuses to admit to it’s existence. Apple claim all innocently that as long as the card in the Dell is 802.11g compatible then I will have no problem. They are, of course, wrong again. Oddly enough the Dell can see the disk and connect to it. It can print using the printer. It can run the Airport utility and configure it. But can it actually ’see’ it. Like buggery it can’t. And notably, the threads on the Apple support forum that all ask why this is happening, go unanswered.
It’s very pretty though.