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Written by Devin Akin
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Monday, 18 August 2008 |
Ha! Made you look. Wouldn't that be the coolest thing though. Is there anyone not sick of overly-complicated WLAN controller and WNMS interfaces? In fact, if Apple would make their latest AirPort Extreme in a 2-radio version that could be powered with 802.3at PoE and managed by something as simple as their AirPort Utility, small companies wouldn't need much else really. Stick in a USB2 Hub, USB2 HDD, and a USB Printer or two, Bonjour zero-config networking, and presto: instant, fast, user-friendly mobile networking. Not bad really, for a small-to-medium office.
Apparently Apple is still focused completely on the home market. I'd love to see them expand into the SMB market - setting the bar very high for user friendliness. If Apple can build OSX Desktop and Server and all of those incredible applications they sell, surely they can build some SMB networking gear and management applications. They certainly aren't short on R&D funds. Have you seen their market cap lately? Wow.
I've wondered whether or not Apple would jump into the WLAN infrastructure game, but I guess that would, to some degree, be like Microsoft doing the same. That being said, Apple does sell quite a bit of hardware, whereas Microsoft doesn't. And along those same lines, Apple's hardware is always first rate. They never half-step on hardware, so if they decided to jump into the WLAN infrastructure market, APs would likely double as home decorations. If they did make such a move, they'd have my full support because I know what it would do for the industry (setting the user-interface bar very high).
Moving along, I've been wondering whether or not it would be a worthwhile endeavor to take Linksys's WRT610N (dual-radio 802.11n) AP (uses open source code) with an AC-to-PoE adapter and try to make it into a thin AP that can talk to a "soft controller" (that runs on a PC as a piece of Windows software). ;) Any programmers out there want to comment?
I don't know about you, but as soon as those new MacBook Pros hit in Sept, I'm snagging one. How can you resist? Vista - ick. XP - getting looooong in the tooth. Linux - just not there yet (though trying hard). OSX isn't perfect, but it's still very sweet. We just have to convince all of our networking application developers to start porting their apps over to OSX.
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