In the AirPort Express lane


Apple's AirPort Express looks like an awesome little 802.11g Swiss Army knife for any traveling Mac user (or PC user, for that matter). I'd love to have one just to have a pocketable wireless access point for traveling. I hadn't expected that they would kill off the modemless AirPort Extreme Base Station, but it makes sense given the feature sets that they would.

AirTunes- now that's just really damn cool. It's a simple way to go toe-to-toe with all of these digital audio boxes without a lot of added complexity and interface design. I could definitely see this technology popping up in other devices in the future- wireless speaker systems, stereo receivers, etc. Maybe TiVo will code it into their Home Media Option so it'll finally be able to play iTunes Music Store files. I had not expected that the AirPort Express would have an optical digital audio output, especially in this clever dual-purpose jack. I suppose it's a boon to the audiophile types who drooled over Apple Lossless Encoding, but to those of us without The Golden Ears™, the analog jack should do fine.

I could definitely find a use for this in my network. When provided a wireless network connection from an existing wireless access point, you get a remote Ethernet jack perfect for that game console, old computer, or other device that doesn't do wireless, a USB printer port perfect for liberating a USB printer from tyrannical control by one particular computer, and of course an audio jack to stream music to a stereo, speaker set, or any other audio device with a spare input jack. I'd put one of these on my desk to give me a spare Ethernet jack, to share an additional USB printer, and to stream music into my stereo. Could put another one down behind our big screen TV to stream music out the TV's speakers. Of course, if we end up moving to a house that lacks Ethernet jacks (Horrors!!), we'd need a pair of these to get the iMacs connected to the network again.

My only question is what kind of protection is there to keep unauthorized users from sending their own music to your AirPort Express? Given that this will work with both PCs and Macs, uses Rendezvous to announce its' presence, and seeing how most people don't protect their wireless networks*, it might be fun to check for these when wardriving. Give someone a musical interlude that they weren't expecting.

Oh, and here is a great "how it works" article from the fine folks at MacWorld. Bummer side is that you can't play to multiple outputs at once this way, but there is also a really neat little tidbit: apparently the optical audio out means that the AirPort Express can handle multichannel (5.1, 6.1, 7.1...) audio if you can play it in iTunes. Which currently you can't (to my knowledge) but who knows what the future holds...

*(The AirPort Setup Assistant prompts for a WEP password on an AirPort Extreme Base Station by default, so Apple might have this set up the same way.)



Apple's AirPort Express looks like an awesome little 802.11g Swiss Army knife for any traveling Mac user (or PC user, for that matter). I'd love to have one just to have a pocketable wireless access point for traveling. I hadn't expected that they would kill off the modemless AirPort Extreme Base Station, but it makes sense given the feature sets that they would.


AirTunes- now that's just really damn cool. It's a simple way to go toe-to-toe with all of these digital audio boxes without a lot of added complexity and interface design. I could definitely see this technology popping up in other devices in the future- wireless speaker systems, stereo receivers, etc. Maybe TiVo will code it into their Home Media Option so it'll finally be able to play iTunes Music Store files. I had not expected that the AirPort Express would have an optical digital audio output, especially in this clever dual-purpose jack. I suppose it's a boon to the audiophile types who drooled over Apple Lossless Encoding, but to those of us without The Golden Ears™, the analog jack should do fine.

I could definitely find a use for this in my network. When provided a wireless network connection from an existing wireless access point, you get a remote Ethernet jack perfect for that game console, old computer, or other device that doesn't do wireless, a USB printer port perfect for liberating a USB printer from tyrannical control by one particular computer, and of course an audio jack to stream music to a stereo, speaker set, or any other audio device with a spare input jack. I'd put one of these on my desk to give me a spare Ethernet jack, to share an additional USB printer, and to stream music into my stereo. Could put another one down behind our big screen TV to stream music out the TV's speakers. Of course, if we end up moving to a house that lacks Ethernet jacks (Horrors!!), we'd need a pair of these to get the iMacs connected to the network again.

My only question is what kind of protection is there to keep unauthorized users from sending their own music to your AirPort Express? Given that this will work with both PCs and Macs, uses Rendezvous to announce its' presence, and seeing how most people don't protect their wireless networks*, it might be fun to check for these when wardriving. Give someone a musical interlude that they weren't expecting.

Oh, and here is a great "how it works" article from the fine folks at MacWorld. Bummer side is that you can't play to multiple outputs at once this way, but there is also a really neat little tidbit: apparently the optical audio out means that the AirPort Express can handle multichannel (5.1, 6.1, 7.1...) audio if you can play it in iTunes. Which currently you can't (to my knowledge) but who knows what the future holds...

*(The AirPort Setup Assistant prompts for a WEP password on an AirPort Extreme Base Station by default, so Apple might have this set up the same way.)

Posted: Mon - June 7, 2004 at 10:47 PM          

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