Tuesday, October 19, 2004
So I bought a new wireless router yesterday and sadly, it wasn't an AirPort Express.
I suppose I should start off with my own wireless router history, so you can see where I'm coming from on this one:
Five years ago, I stood there in the Javits Center in Manhattan and watched Steve Jobs unveil the very first iBook and then pass it through a hula-hoop (look ma, no wires!) without losing its network connection, thanks to the wireless receptor inside of it and the wireless transmitter backstage. They were, of course, the first products of their kind in history. And within four months of that day, they were mine.
It was an easy decision, really. Now that wireless internet was finally an option, in my mind there was no other option. Today, the iBook has taken licking and is still kicking (albeit more than little slowly), with MacOS X Panther, earlier iLife apps, and more. On the other hand, my $300 AirPort Base Station wireless router lasted about four years before Father Time caught up with it, meaning that I had its services for about $75 per year.
By the middle of 2003, when my own original Base Station died, I had already added no less than ten of them to the school that I worked for. The whole campus was wireless, teachers were gallavanting about with their wireless iBooks, and all was good. By this time several other companies had brought their own (fully compatible) wireless routers to market, but thanks to the utterly bizarre purchasing policies of the district I worked for, buying wireless equipment from anyone other than Apple simply wasn't an option (and even being allowed to buy it from Apple was difficult, but that's a story for another day). So needless to say, we went with all-Apple wireless routers, despite the fact that I was aware that a variety of companies were offering competing products that were considerably less expensive (and again, fully compatible).
But when it was time to replace my own router, the Apple Base Station was actually not an option -- not at the prices Apple was still charging, anyway. So my tight budget and I settled on a bargain-basement router that was such a "no-name" product that it literally didn't have a name on it. It cost me about $75 (at that time an unheard of price for a wireless router), and lasted about a year. Ironically enough, it ended up costing me about the same $75 per year that my "much more expensive" Base Station had.
To be fair, it was actually the power outage during the last of three consecutive hurricanes that killed the thing. But even before that, the range was bad, it froze up too often, and so on. I'd even taken to calling it "my piece of crap wireless router" not long after I'd bought it. So when it died, never had the words "you get what you pay for" rang so thoroughly in my head. Somewhere along the line I'd made the mistake of buying an identical "piece of crap router" for a family member, who eventually had intermittent problems with it and gave it back to me. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave it a shot, but it just wasn't the answer. The bottom line was that I was going to have to buy something. And considering that I've spent the past six months telling anyone who will listen that my next Apple product will be an AirPort Express, my course of action at this point seemed obvious. So I just ran out and snapped one up, right?
Uh actually, no, I didn't.
I would like to have done so, and I still hope to before too much longer. But sadly, not today. And this time it really didn't come down to price -- at least not where AirPort Express is concerned. I happen to think that Apple's miniature, hold-it-in-the-palm-of-your-hand, ultra-portable AirPort Express is properly priced at $129 (although it'll truly become a mainstream product only when it reaches a sub-$100 price point -- look for $99 after the holidays, says my gut). Smaller, more portable versions of devices use smaller, more expensive components (think laptop vs. desktop), so it didn't bother me at all that Apple's $129 AirPort Express cost about fifty percent more than the $80 top-shelf name brand full-size wireless routers that litter the shevles of every store from Brandsmart to WalMart. Besides, the AirPort Express has AirTunes built in, and while I can't see a scenario in which I'd actually use AirTunes, it's pretty darned cool.
But AirPor Express has something missing, namely a downstream ethernet port or two (or four, actually) that you typically find on a full-size wireless router. It does make sense, as when you go smaller you do have to give up some things that just won't fit. But since my home network currently consists of both a wireless PowerBook and a wired G3 iMac, going with the AirPort Express would have required adding an ethernet hub to the mix or plopping an AirPort card into the iMac. Actually, I could have done either one of those without too much trouble (and no extra cost), but it just sort of defied the point. Let's say I add a wired hub, well now I'm just junking up the place with extra equipment and giving up any advantage I had by going small in the first place. And if I instead went all-wireless, guess what happens when I take the AirPort Express on the road with me, and then someone else tries to use the iMac wirelessly? Just too messy, all of it. Besides, I'm not the type who wants to walk in the door, then fish around in my bag for my AirPort Express, then plug it into my modem, and only then be able to get my PowerBook online. I want to be able to walk in the door, flip open the lid, and be surfing...with the AirPort Express still sitting in my bag, so I'll be sure to have it with me the next time I leave the house.
What I realized, simply enough, is that I needed a standard, stationary wireless router connected to my cable modem, a router that never moved from its spot. And if I was going to do that, I might as well just go with a full-size router, since full-size equipment is invariably less expensive. My first choice, of course, is to go with Apple's full-size AirPort base station, so I look up its price, and...huh?
One hundred and ninety-nine dollars? No thanks. It doesn't make sense on any level. Whether you think that the $129 AirPort Express is appropriately priced or not, I think we can all agree that the full-sized AirPort base station, which ostensibly uses larger and therefore less expensive parts, should cost less than AirPort Express, not more. The laws of electronics, the pricing of the competition, and (most of all) common sense say that this should be the case...and yet here is Apple's full-size wireless router still pushing $200. You know, the last time I was in the market for a router, it was only the cheapest, crappiest wireless routers that had prices absurdly lower than the AirPort Base Station. But now, it's all of them. Like I said, no thanks.
So I settled on a top-shelf name brand wireless router from someone other than Apple, and when I recalled that my current PowerBook still only uses the old 802.11b wireless standard, and that a new PowerBook is nowhere near my sights, I concluded that I might as well go ahead and save even more money by getting an 802.111b router. In the end, I paid a whopping $49. For nearly the exact same product that Apple sells for four times as much.
Needless to say, something needs to change here.
And I suspect that before too long, it will. The problem here, of course, is that here in 2004, the wireless internet market is fully commoditized (with AirTunes being the one lone exception), and so you just can't sell the products at any worthwhile profit margin. I can't imagine Apple still sells more than a handful of full-size AirPort Base Stations at $199 each, so the company is probably struggling with what exactly to do with the product. Reprice it so that it sells well but doesn't make any money? Kill it off completely?
My first instinct would be the latter -- why even waste the effort making the product? But Apple has two things going for it that would probably allow the company to get away with selling a whole lot of AirPort Base Stations at something like $99 when the competition charges $79. The first is AirTunes. After having successfully piloted the feature on the AirPort Express, it's just about time Apple rolls it into the full-size Base Station (Apple loves to do this kind of thing, see the scroll wheel on the iPod mini). And Apple's second trump card here is the fact that people buying Mac computers will tend to gravitate toward an Apple-branded wireless router over a third-party one, even if the Apple product is priced moderately higher. I do this because I know for a fact that Apple just flat-out makes better stuff than the competition in any given market. Many others do this simply because they feel it's the "safe" thing to do. Even many Mac users have their heads so screwed on backwards when it comes to the myth of compatibility, that no matter how many times you try to explain to them that third-party wireless products are fully compatible thanks to Apple's ongoing insistence on adhering to open standards, they still can't force themselves to believe it, and so they'll buy the Apple-branded accessory no matter what. It's one of those few areas in which the ongoing hoax about "compatiblity" actually benefits Apple.
Oh, and one other thing -- if you haven't noticed, AirPort Express has been marketed as a Windows product from day one. And it's not just a revenue stream; it's Apple's second chance (think iPod) to put an Apple product in the hands of Windows users for use with their Windows PC, so that they can see first-hand that all the vicious lies about "Apple compatiblity" are just that -- vicious lies. So even if Apple has to reprice the AirPort Base Station such that it doesn't make any money at all, it should do so, because it can still be profitable for the company in the long run.
So yeah, it's a bit of a sad day. If I was ever going to spend money on router technology again, I really wanted it to be an AirPort Express. But that day will come soon enough. In the mean time, let's hope Apple figures out its gameplan for wireless internet products going forward.
I suppose I should start off with my own wireless router history, so you can see where I'm coming from on this one:
Five years ago, I stood there in the Javits Center in Manhattan and watched Steve Jobs unveil the very first iBook and then pass it through a hula-hoop (look ma, no wires!) without losing its network connection, thanks to the wireless receptor inside of it and the wireless transmitter backstage. They were, of course, the first products of their kind in history. And within four months of that day, they were mine.
It was an easy decision, really. Now that wireless internet was finally an option, in my mind there was no other option. Today, the iBook has taken licking and is still kicking (albeit more than little slowly), with MacOS X Panther, earlier iLife apps, and more. On the other hand, my $300 AirPort Base Station wireless router lasted about four years before Father Time caught up with it, meaning that I had its services for about $75 per year.
By the middle of 2003, when my own original Base Station died, I had already added no less than ten of them to the school that I worked for. The whole campus was wireless, teachers were gallavanting about with their wireless iBooks, and all was good. By this time several other companies had brought their own (fully compatible) wireless routers to market, but thanks to the utterly bizarre purchasing policies of the district I worked for, buying wireless equipment from anyone other than Apple simply wasn't an option (and even being allowed to buy it from Apple was difficult, but that's a story for another day). So needless to say, we went with all-Apple wireless routers, despite the fact that I was aware that a variety of companies were offering competing products that were considerably less expensive (and again, fully compatible).
But when it was time to replace my own router, the Apple Base Station was actually not an option -- not at the prices Apple was still charging, anyway. So my tight budget and I settled on a bargain-basement router that was such a "no-name" product that it literally didn't have a name on it. It cost me about $75 (at that time an unheard of price for a wireless router), and lasted about a year. Ironically enough, it ended up costing me about the same $75 per year that my "much more expensive" Base Station had.
To be fair, it was actually the power outage during the last of three consecutive hurricanes that killed the thing. But even before that, the range was bad, it froze up too often, and so on. I'd even taken to calling it "my piece of crap wireless router" not long after I'd bought it. So when it died, never had the words "you get what you pay for" rang so thoroughly in my head. Somewhere along the line I'd made the mistake of buying an identical "piece of crap router" for a family member, who eventually had intermittent problems with it and gave it back to me. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave it a shot, but it just wasn't the answer. The bottom line was that I was going to have to buy something. And considering that I've spent the past six months telling anyone who will listen that my next Apple product will be an AirPort Express, my course of action at this point seemed obvious. So I just ran out and snapped one up, right?
Uh actually, no, I didn't.
I would like to have done so, and I still hope to before too much longer. But sadly, not today. And this time it really didn't come down to price -- at least not where AirPort Express is concerned. I happen to think that Apple's miniature, hold-it-in-the-palm-of-your-hand, ultra-portable AirPort Express is properly priced at $129 (although it'll truly become a mainstream product only when it reaches a sub-$100 price point -- look for $99 after the holidays, says my gut). Smaller, more portable versions of devices use smaller, more expensive components (think laptop vs. desktop), so it didn't bother me at all that Apple's $129 AirPort Express cost about fifty percent more than the $80 top-shelf name brand full-size wireless routers that litter the shevles of every store from Brandsmart to WalMart. Besides, the AirPort Express has AirTunes built in, and while I can't see a scenario in which I'd actually use AirTunes, it's pretty darned cool.
But AirPor Express has something missing, namely a downstream ethernet port or two (or four, actually) that you typically find on a full-size wireless router. It does make sense, as when you go smaller you do have to give up some things that just won't fit. But since my home network currently consists of both a wireless PowerBook and a wired G3 iMac, going with the AirPort Express would have required adding an ethernet hub to the mix or plopping an AirPort card into the iMac. Actually, I could have done either one of those without too much trouble (and no extra cost), but it just sort of defied the point. Let's say I add a wired hub, well now I'm just junking up the place with extra equipment and giving up any advantage I had by going small in the first place. And if I instead went all-wireless, guess what happens when I take the AirPort Express on the road with me, and then someone else tries to use the iMac wirelessly? Just too messy, all of it. Besides, I'm not the type who wants to walk in the door, then fish around in my bag for my AirPort Express, then plug it into my modem, and only then be able to get my PowerBook online. I want to be able to walk in the door, flip open the lid, and be surfing...with the AirPort Express still sitting in my bag, so I'll be sure to have it with me the next time I leave the house.
What I realized, simply enough, is that I needed a standard, stationary wireless router connected to my cable modem, a router that never moved from its spot. And if I was going to do that, I might as well just go with a full-size router, since full-size equipment is invariably less expensive. My first choice, of course, is to go with Apple's full-size AirPort base station, so I look up its price, and...huh?
One hundred and ninety-nine dollars? No thanks. It doesn't make sense on any level. Whether you think that the $129 AirPort Express is appropriately priced or not, I think we can all agree that the full-sized AirPort base station, which ostensibly uses larger and therefore less expensive parts, should cost less than AirPort Express, not more. The laws of electronics, the pricing of the competition, and (most of all) common sense say that this should be the case...and yet here is Apple's full-size wireless router still pushing $200. You know, the last time I was in the market for a router, it was only the cheapest, crappiest wireless routers that had prices absurdly lower than the AirPort Base Station. But now, it's all of them. Like I said, no thanks.
So I settled on a top-shelf name brand wireless router from someone other than Apple, and when I recalled that my current PowerBook still only uses the old 802.11b wireless standard, and that a new PowerBook is nowhere near my sights, I concluded that I might as well go ahead and save even more money by getting an 802.111b router. In the end, I paid a whopping $49. For nearly the exact same product that Apple sells for four times as much.
Needless to say, something needs to change here.
And I suspect that before too long, it will. The problem here, of course, is that here in 2004, the wireless internet market is fully commoditized (with AirTunes being the one lone exception), and so you just can't sell the products at any worthwhile profit margin. I can't imagine Apple still sells more than a handful of full-size AirPort Base Stations at $199 each, so the company is probably struggling with what exactly to do with the product. Reprice it so that it sells well but doesn't make any money? Kill it off completely?
My first instinct would be the latter -- why even waste the effort making the product? But Apple has two things going for it that would probably allow the company to get away with selling a whole lot of AirPort Base Stations at something like $99 when the competition charges $79. The first is AirTunes. After having successfully piloted the feature on the AirPort Express, it's just about time Apple rolls it into the full-size Base Station (Apple loves to do this kind of thing, see the scroll wheel on the iPod mini). And Apple's second trump card here is the fact that people buying Mac computers will tend to gravitate toward an Apple-branded wireless router over a third-party one, even if the Apple product is priced moderately higher. I do this because I know for a fact that Apple just flat-out makes better stuff than the competition in any given market. Many others do this simply because they feel it's the "safe" thing to do. Even many Mac users have their heads so screwed on backwards when it comes to the myth of compatibility, that no matter how many times you try to explain to them that third-party wireless products are fully compatible thanks to Apple's ongoing insistence on adhering to open standards, they still can't force themselves to believe it, and so they'll buy the Apple-branded accessory no matter what. It's one of those few areas in which the ongoing hoax about "compatiblity" actually benefits Apple.
Oh, and one other thing -- if you haven't noticed, AirPort Express has been marketed as a Windows product from day one. And it's not just a revenue stream; it's Apple's second chance (think iPod) to put an Apple product in the hands of Windows users for use with their Windows PC, so that they can see first-hand that all the vicious lies about "Apple compatiblity" are just that -- vicious lies. So even if Apple has to reprice the AirPort Base Station such that it doesn't make any money at all, it should do so, because it can still be profitable for the company in the long run.
So yeah, it's a bit of a sad day. If I was ever going to spend money on router technology again, I really wanted it to be an AirPort Express. But that day will come soon enough. In the mean time, let's hope Apple figures out its gameplan for wireless internet products going forward.
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