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When Marketing Gets Goofy (1/8/03)
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Well, the long-awaited next iteration of AirPort is finally here, and it's a doozy. At 54 Mbps, it packs five times the bandwidth of its predecessor, but since it's based on the "plays well with others" 802.11g standard instead of the "screw you guys, I'm going home" 802.11a, it's fully compatible with the older 11 Mbps equipment. The new cards cost $99, just like the old cards used to, and the new Base Station drops to a mere $99-- even though it boasts wacky new features like a port to add a range-extending antenna, and what we consider to be a stroke of pure genius: a USB port that allows every computer on your network to share a single USB printer. This is all undeniably good stuff.
But then they went and named it "AirPort Extreme." Hrm.
The serious old-timers around here will recall the rumors back in '97 that Apple planned to call its upcoming pro-level Power Mac (the one code-named PowerExpress) the Power Mac G3 Extreme, which only convinced us that The Steve may well still have been experiencing potent acid flashbacks. PowerExpress was cancelled, however, so we never got to find out whether the "Extreme" rumors had anything to them. All our concerns of "Extreme" product nomenclature dropped to the background for the next five years.
Of course, last year when Jaguar was touted as including "Quartz Extreme" technology, we had an inkling that it was the start of trouble. True, Quartz Extreme is merely a part of a major Apple product, not a product itself, but it all begins with the little things. And now here we are, facing the advent of AirPort Extreme, in all its technological glory and nomenclatural dorkiness. Worse yet? The Base Station actually has the words "AirPort Extreme" stamped right across the front of that otherwise supercool flying saucer.
What's next? AppleWorks Extreme? The RadicalMac? iPod To The Max? We're casting our vote for Mac OS X Bitchin', ourselves.
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/8/03 episode: January 8, 2003: White is the new Black, Big is the new Small, and Aluminum is the new Titanium. Meanwhile, Apple goes app-crazy at the Expo, and the new AirPort is cool in all ways but one...
Other scenes from that episode: 3893: 2003: Titanium, Shmitanium (1/8/03) There's no doubt about it, Scrappy, there was enough Super Magic Happy-Fun Go Juice in that Stevenote to keep us Reality Distortion Field addicts flying high until at least, say, Thursday evening. Forget about the fact that so-called "dead certs" like new iPods and iMacs were nowhere to be found; it's Elvis's birthday and we can't even celebrate properly, thankyuhverruhmuch, because we're still plotzing at how Apple actually released not one, not two, but three new software applications with names that don't begin with a lowercase "i."... 3894: What's Appening Now (1/8/03) Giganto-mini PowerBooks aside, January 7th was actually the International Day of the App. Indeed, we didn't actually keep count, but we're pretty good judges of these things and we estimate that the Stevenote was well into its sixteenth hour before Jobs wrapped up his demo of Apple's forty-fifth new or revised application and finally made with the aluminum already...
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