Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 21st Dec 2006 08:29 UTC, submitted by Valour
BSD and Linux programmers have had a lot of success in creating drivers for new computer hardware in a timely manner, but much of their effort has been without the support of major hardware manufacturers. Intel, Marvell, Texas Instruments and Broadcom, though separate and competing entities, seem by one consent to prevent non-Microsoft operating systems from working properly with some of their most widely-used network chips.
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Member since:2005-07-07
$650 for an airport card is a rip-off. You can get those cheaply for $50 on the internet. That's what it cost me when I bought mine a year ago.
A quick google search reveals http://www.airportcardblast.com/original-apple-airport-card.html
The sale price is $79, and the normal price is $139. It's a far cry from your $650.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I don't know about anyone else, but I've noticed that support for non-"Airport" wifi hardware is one of the big weak spots in OS X. I recently had a client with an older iBook that he wanted to get online wirelessly. My options were: pay $650 to the local Apple reseller for an internal airport card (I'm sure they sell *tons* of those), or pay $80 for a belkin USB wifi adapter shipped from Toronto. The latter is the option I eventually ended up going with, after trying and returning 5 other models of USB wifi adapters (none of which worked, despite a few hours futzing around with instructions that involved manually editing .plist files).