So Much for Usability

Like many, I think some of Apple's consumer products are fairly slick. The iPod is an undeniable boon to my entertainment...and I'll hopefully have an iPhone 3G in the next couple of weeks. Apple is renown for its products' slick form factors and, more importantly, their usability. They made the iPod dead-simple, and following in the long tradition of the idon-driven MacOS, the iPhone's interface is simple for a smartphone. I recently lost my beloved Belkin travel router, and replaced it with an Apple Airport Express. The results have been severely disappointing.

Like many technologists, I'm fairly well-versed in setting up home and travel networking equipment. Linksys products, for all their flaws, helped revolutionize home networking by providing a fairly intuitive web interface to routers, hubs, and access points. Along the way, a fairly standard set of terminology developed. I understand terms like SSID, 802.11, bridge, hub, etc, and I've become accustomed to using them when setting up my equipment. So it's not surprise that I was in for a bit of a shock when I installed and tried to use the Airport Express configuration utility. Apple has tried to dumb down networking, hiding the important details from the person configuring the router. After 3 days of trying, I still can't get the Airport Express to work. Reading the manual doesn't help: it doesn't go into nearly enough detail. That's another pet peeve of mine: manuals that were written by marketers, instead of technical people with writing skills.

Worse yet, Apple's configuration usility seems to have taken over control of the computer's wireless card, and is preventing it from connecting to non-Apple 802.11 networks...I guess it's all rosy in the world of Steve Jobs until you decide to mix platforms...