Planned Obsolescence?

Did you know the new apple airport is faster than the old one (provided you also get new network cards) and is blue-tooth ready (whatever that means) and you can attach a USB printer to it, so you can print acorss the network (provided you are running 10.2 or better). Pretty cool, eh? I was saying that if I didn't already have an ariport bass station, I'd want to get one, you know, if all my 'puters were on 10.2 and I didn't already have older network cards.

I'd been having some problems where my airport network was going down intermittantly. Then, this morning, it started having it's red LEDS blink on and off while it made buzzing sounds. Not good. Resetting did not help. So I sold it for parts to Elite Computing and got the brand new one, which has many features that I can't use. yay. they don't make the old ones anymore and I'm not sure buying a used one would be very smart, given the sad, slow burn mine went through.

Anyway, I took the old one apart, looking for an obvious indicator of something wrong, like a loose connector or a smoking chip. I found nothing. But there's a lucent card inside. It's not apple technology. It's apple re-marketting Lucent technology. The super drive isn't apple either, it's panasonic. And motorolla akes apple processor chips. I guess Apple is a software company and a hardware reseller, that's not bargain friendly. I wonder if people still have "Hackentoshes." Those were home-brew 'puters mixing apple-type and Intel-type technology. They were rumored to be fast, upgradable and able to speak both apple and PC in the time when that didn't happen.