And here you thought this was going to be about politics.
Nope. This little screed is about the problems I had with an AirPort Extreme base station I bought from, and returned to, the Apple Store Soho last week. It's about the hassle Jeffrey's having trying to upgrade his machine to Panther. It's about a little sentinel itch I'm having about some OS X functionality, and users, and maybe even Apple's market share.
I say this not because I think there's anything terribly wrong with OS X, or even that there's any superior alternative available, at any price. Preface your understanding of everything I'm about to write by remembering that Macintoshes were supposed to be "computers for the rest of us." And while I'm certainly nobody's idea of a software engineer, I have been working with these machines and none other for some eighteen years; if I'm running into problems, well, maybe I'm not the only one.
Here's the situation. Nurri has a PowerBook with an AirPort card; my own PowerBook bears the Extreme version. And we've been quite happy knocking about our apartment connecting to the Web via the 802.11b offered by a three-year old AirPort base station. But lately, spurred on by the budding trees and the soft breezes wafting up through the window, I've been having dreams of working wirelessly out in the park, which would require a stronger 802.11g signal. And what would provide that stronger signal? Upgrading the base station to Extreme and outfitting it with an antenna (about which more later).
Since my previous experience of AirPort had led me to conclude that it's the most painless networking technology ever devised, and since, well, you never have to push me that terribly hard to visit the Apple store and pick up some New Stuff, I was actually really looking forward to the process of upgrading. I'd swing down to Prince Street, replenish my supply of Dean & DeLuca's House Blend, pick up some stuff for Nurri at Kate's Paperie, grab the base station and antenna, and the rest would just about take care of itself.
The shopping expedition phase of my mission went off without a hitch; I even found time to pick up a wedding present for our intrepid glomad friends Teresa and Frank. It was only when I got home and unpacked my gear that things started to fall apart.
First of all, it turns out the Dr. Bott antenna is only compatible with AirPort Extreme base stations with an antenna port, a requirement which is noted only in fine print on the product's box and an affordance which is provided on only the more expensive of the two AirPort Extreme base station models currently offered. Did you know there were two different models available? I sure didn't. You have to parse the language on Apple's product page pretty carefully to figure this out, because it's only obvious in retrospect. And, for what it's worth, the packaging of the two models is similar enough that when I had presented my selection (the modemless $199 option - why would I need a modem?) to a store clerk and specifically asked him if it was compatible with the antenna, he said yes.
So right away, when I got to setting up my new uber-network, I was disappointed. I probably still would have kept the Extreme base station, though, had the next part not happened.
You'll recall that Nurri's (Panther-equipped) laptop had the plain vanilla AirPort card as opposed to the Extreme variety, which is the only excuse I can conceive of for the base station's manifest failure, even though it's ostensibly backward-compatible. I set up the base station with, naturally, the AirPort Setup Assistant, configured it to require a password compatible with the 40-bit WEP security offered by 802.11b, and figured we were good to go.
I figured wrong. For the next two hours, I tried to get both machines to automatically recognize the network, and consistently wound up confronted with an error message that the password I had entered was incorrect. After just setting the password. Myself. Multiple times. In fact, I never did get a stable network up and running, for even one of our two boxes.
I even went back to the Setup Assistant on Nurri's machine, figuring - I know, it's something akin to magical thinking, but I was desperate at this point - that if I configured the network using the machine with the more restrictive hardware onboard it'd come good. I tried rebuilding the network from scratch with the AirPort Admin Utility, again on both machines. No joy. Let me reiterate: at no point in these two hours could I get Apple's "extremely easy" wireless base station to provide a network simultaneously accessible from two Apple Macintosh machines running the very latest version of OS X, nor even provide a stable network for either of the two operating alone. (I shudder to think about what might have happened had I even tried to network non-Apple machines, as you're supposedly able to do.) And, again, I'm no expert, but I do like to think I know my way around a Mac by now.
So back my purchases went, both of 'em. The store manager was professional enough to waive the restocking fee, at my request, since after all I had specifically asked his in-store people about compatibility before buying, and that at least made me happy. But there went my dream of surfing out in the park, and more importantly for Apple, there went an opportunity to sell me, an extremely loyal customer, on their current generation of wireless networking hardware. Once burned, and all that.
And this is where I see the hazard for Apple. If you're going to hold yourself forth as the avatar of consumer-grade simplicity, you've got to deliver on that promise, fresh from the box, first time and every time. You cannot simply continue to prevail upon the good will of a co-dependent customer base, not if you want to remain a viable business. It's one thing to confront me with a less than acceptable experience: I've never owned anything but a Macintosh of one stripe or another, and never will, as long as they keep selling them.
But the future of your business, as you well know, Steve, is in converting the other 95% of the audience. Sure, some of those people you'll win over by providing a humane UI for Unix, and some of them you'll seduce with your gateway drugs, the iPod and mini and even iTunes. But the vast majority of them will be people who have heard that they can put the rough edges and exasperatingly nonobvious configuration protocols of the Windows experience behind them by buying a Mac.
So you need to work on a couple of things. You need, first and foremost, to disambiguate the fact that there are two different AirPort Extreme base stations, that the difference between them is more than the simple presence or absence of a modem, and that there are some things you can do with one that can not be done with the other.
You need to explain, to even the least technical of your users, the difference in security provisions between AirPort and AirPort Extreme, and why they may come into conflict. You need to ensure that, when you assert something is backward-compatible, it really is - because, after all, a two-machine network, both of which are equipped with the very latest version of the software and one of whose network cards is a previous iteration, is very far from a worst-case scenario.
And, although my past experiences with Apple Store personnel have been without exception highly satisfactory, you need to ensure that when a staff member says an accessory you sell will work with your other products, they're not just saying so.
In this case, as with so many other defaults in a high-technology context, a lot of little things had to go wrong in order for this frustration to occur. The product packaging and labeling, the staffer's attention to detail, the configuration interface: any one of these would have presented opportunities to explain why my attempt was doomed to failure, before initiating the saga of purchase and double crosstown trip and return and restocking that profited neither Apple nor myself. (Of course, my own personal knowledge and understanding of 802.11 networking is open to question as well, but after all, Apple's entire USP is bound up with the idea of effortless success for non-experts.)
For all you Apple partisans I am sure to hear from: I obviously want them to thrive in the marketplace, every bit as much as you do. A quick "Sunnyvale, we have a problem," calling attention to the places where they could use a little tightening up, is more likely to help them than blandly insisting there's nothing wrong, don't you think? [v-2 Organisation RSS feed]
[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "postCosmos" hasn't been defined.]
8:00:11 PM 
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