Apple users: as far removed from Woz as possible

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 13 December 2007 20:30

Opinion and Analysis

It does not take much to get the Apple user community up in arms - just a mention that there may be a defect in Mac OS X is sufficient to invite abuse, ridicule and plain silliness as though there is even  one operating system in this world of ours which is perfect.
The one thing that really came home to me after I wrote about the wireless connectivity problems I was having with a new MacBook Pro was the resolute refusal of some to believe that there could be anything wrong with their precious OS. And these folk were just unwilling to look elsewhere to see if my claims were justified. I must admit that I could have been more specific but still there's no excuse for the state of denial in which some Apple users appear to permanently exist.

So, first things first; there's some evidence of problems here. More here. Still more here. And even more here. I could go on .... The point is there are wireless connectivity problems with Leopard. Period.

If one is paying top dollar for hardware and software - the hardware is proudly advertisted as being made in Cupertino, as though that confers some special status on it - then  is one wrong to expect a higher standard of efficiency as well?

Some background: I bought the laptop which had Leopard, the new release of Apple's Mac OS X operating system, installed and no matter what I tried it would not provide a stable link to the internet via the Airport card. I installed a number of available updates, including one which was said to be for fixing some problems with unspecififed 802.11b and g routers. The access point I use is a D-Link DI-514 which supports the b standard. It's served me fine over the last four years, during which period it's been used with all three common operating systems - Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

I've been using WEP 128-bit security all this time and it's been sufficient for my needs; it's just the first tier of security in my set-up. The DI-514 has no more firmware upgrades as support for it has ended. I tried doing without any encryption but that did help. Nor did changing the channel make things any better. The periodic timing out while trying to access sites on the web continued.