09th Jun 2004
Airport Express A Go Go
Two tangents here …
The first is that I head to the airport in a few days to go to New York, so that I can move into my new apartment in the UWS.
But that’s not the Airport I really wanted to write about.
I’m impressed by the new Airport Express. You’ll see some whining elsewhere about how it doesn’t go far enough as a sort of iTunes remote control.
I look at it this way:
- $129 for a portable 802.11g AP. Something I can throw in my bag and take wherever, if for no other reason than to extend the range of some hotspot.
- Oh, and it has a USB connection for a printer. Yeah, ok, I can see using that. At this point, it’s already worth $129 to me.
- And it has audio out, analog and digital. This could be great, depending on how it’s implemented.
So I think it’s a potentially a great product, with a couple of caveats: they better nail the software on the first try, or there’s going to be a lot of ill-will generated. The other thing that strikes me is the interaction with iTunes - What if I want output to go to my living room speakers, but also to the speakers hooked up to my PowerBook? In other words, one-at-a-time output is not going to go over very well.
