Geez, you try to give people a little of the hand-wringing, nail-biting drama they so desperately need in their otherwise bleak and miserable lives, and how do they repay you? By throwing facts in your face. Poor Computerworld; barely a day had passed since it reported that the final spec for 802.11g (the wireless technology used in AirPort Extreme) had been "throttled down" from its original 54 Mbps data rate to a measly "between 10 and 20 Mbps" before Apple's veeps had to go and spoil the fun by, you know, telling the actual truth and stuff.

According to MacCentral, the undisputed King of the Ten-Minute Auto-Refresh, Apple Software Veep Mike Bell insists that the spec has in fact "not been throttled back at all," prompting MacCentral to label Computerworld's report as "meaningless." (Ouch. Words can hurt like a fist, guys.) The gist is that 802.11g's raw data rate is, indeed, 54 Mbps-- but that's just the speed at which the radios talk to each other. Once you actually want to do something useful with that connection, like send a file over TCP/IP, the maximum real-world throughput is only about 20 Mbps. This is still a massive (dare we say... "extreme"?) performance increase over the 802.11b used in the original version of AirPort, which has a raw data rate of 11 Mbps and a real-world throughput of "between 4 and 5.5 Mbps."

"What's this?" you ask, "The 11 Mbps AirPort equipment I've been using for three and a half years really tops out at 5 Mbps max?" Well, sure, Sparky. If you only use it for broadband surfing you'd never notice, since most broadband connections don't even come close to 5 Mbps, let alone 11. But just for giggles, we grabbed a stopwatch and timed how long it took us to send a 9.4 MB QuickTime copy of Kevin Smith's "The Flying Car" from one node to another via AirPort, and the calculator tells us we got a whopping 3.76 Mbps. If it weren't for Mike Bell's clarification, we'd think our Base Station had been at the cough syrup again.

While it's great news that the final 802.11g spec won't make AirPort Extreme any slower than it is now, we're a little nonplussed by the vast gulf of emptiness hanging between the 54 Mbps spec and its 10-20 Mbps real-world performance. It's one thing to buy an 80 GB disk only to find it has a 74.5 GB formatted capacity; that's only a 7% discrepancy. And opening up a box of Froot Loops to find that it's only half-full, well, there is that little label about "this unit packed by weight, not by volume; some settling of contents may occur." (On a side note, don't bother calling Battle Creek and demanding to know why they don't package the contents until after it settles; they're just no help at all.)

But Apple's web site states that AirPort Extreme "lets you share files with other AirPort Extreme users on your network at speeds of up to 54 Mbps," which, as far as we can make out, just isn't possible; even under the best conditions, users probably won't ever see half that kind of speed. Then again, Apple does include a disclaimer that "actual speed will vary based on range, connection rate, and other factors." Among "other factors" we suppose we could list "presence or absence of a magical wish-granting frog that can alter the physical laws of time, space, and dimension," but it still seems like a stretch. Nevertheless, iffy marketing claims aside, the bottom line is that AirPort Extreme is much faster than AirPort, and it won't suffer a speed cutback due to the final 802.11g spec. Good news all around.

Meanwhile, Greg Joswiak, Apple's Veep of Hardware Product Marketing, remarks that he feels "really good about [Apple's] decision" to use 802.11g instead of the slightly-faster but shorter-range and incompatible 802.11a standard, but "unfortunately there are some folks out there that are making a last-ditch effort to try to cause confusion in the market." Holy cats, are we interpreting this correctly? Is Greg implying that the Computerworld article wasn't just the product of some yahoo who didn't do his homework, but was instead a deliberate smear piece commissioned by an unscrupulous pro-802.11a conspiracy? Clearly we missed the real drama here-- that AirPort Extreme is under attack by Freemasons and the Illuminati. Man, we are losing our touch...

Ah, statistics; it's all in how you interpret them. Numbers dance with a mere change in attitude. Take, for instance, last week's Internet Retailer article which reported that according to Nielsen/NetRatings, Apple's web site completely obliterated all other computer hardware manufacturers' sites when it came to sheer volume of traffic; for the week of May 11th, Apple.com was loaded by "3.75 million unique visitors," which comes out to "73.7% of all visitors to hardware sites." Hewlett-Packard came in a distant second at 2.47 million visitors, with Dell next at 1.94 million. At the same time, though, visitors to Apple's site stayed only an average of 3 minutes and 48 seconds before leaving again, whereas visitors to HP stuck around for just over fifteen minutes, and Dell kept people hanging around for 8:44.

Okay, so how should you interpret these factoids? Well, if you're a Mac pessimist, try this on for size: Apple's high number of visitors but low average visit length reflects a ton of traffic from Wintel users who stopped by to check out the iTunes Music Store and then immediately bailed when they found out there's no Windows version yet. Then there are all the visits by intrigued Wintel potential switchers who, upon arriving, didn't like what they saw and left Apple's site without buying a Mac. By extension, visits to Wintel sites are longer because people are actually buying stuff. Which just means that Apple's market share will keep on shrinking, the company will eventually collapse under the weight of its own irrelevance, and we'll all be doomed to spend the rest of our short, miserable lives dealing with Wintel dreck and eating wet cigarette butts in the dark like a dog.

On the other hand, if you're a Mac optimist, you might instead choose to interpret the data thusly: HP and Dell receive longer visits than Apple because their web sites, like their computers, are poorly designed by dyslexic spider monkeys on Xanax, so it takes people a lot longer to find what they're looking for. And it's a pretty safe bet that Mac users on average better grasp the concepts of "time is money" and "you get what you pay for," so more of them have shelled out for broadband connections so can get what they need in a hurry; meanwhile, more Wintel users are still puttering around on dial-up connections and taking half an hour to download a firmware update. There's also some room for interpretation in just what Nielsen means by "unique visitors"; the huge disparity in the numbers between Apple's site and those for Dell and HP may mean that while each Apple user is indeed a unique and shining example of rugged individualism, most Wintel users simply count as a single homogeneous beige featureless mass. Just a thought.

So how do we interpret the numbers? Well, personally, down here at the AtAT compound we think they reflect a high percentage of assimilated alien life forms visiting Apple's site-- aliens with a much more evolved aesthetic sense than that of the average mouth-breathing human troglodyte As for the short visit lengths, we chalk it all up to the fact that most assimilated aliens in our society today are required by the mothership to complete an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course immediately after assuming human form. However, there's the slightest chance that we may be wrong.