Personal Dork Assistant

Expressive

The rumor sites' speculations hit a feverish pitch in anticipation of Apple's release of upgraded G5 PowerMacs. The old fruit company threw everyone a curveball, though, with the introduction of the Airport Express. It was a brilliant idea, to have Steve Jobs do what he does best, namely flashy product intros, at the WSJ D: All Things Digital Conference in front of tech-luminaries and financial bigshots. The money guys must've had their BlackBerries handy, as AAPL jumped to a 52-week high after the demo.

So what the hell does it do? It doesn't julienne fries, but that's about the only function it's missing:

• It's an 802.11g base station that happens to be the size of my PowerBook power brick.
• It also has bridging capabilities, to attach a wire-only device wirelessly to an existing base station.
• It supports WDS, which makes it a wireless repeater that extends the reach of the wireless network without requiring a wired connection between the antennas. Apple specs limit the feature to only interoperate amongst Apple stations (Extreme or Express). However, other manufacturers using the same chipset may also work.
• It's a wireless USB print-server. So all the wired and wireless computers on the network can transparently share the same printer.
• Last but not least, it takes iTunes (on PC or Mac) streams and outputs the music through an analog or digital line out. With the Apple Lossless Encoder, one can have bit-perfect, digital, wireless music streaming from the computer all the way to the receiver. It's one of those things I figured I'd be able to do when I eventually build an HTPC, but to hell with Frankenstein hardware and kludgy software, when we have this one box that does it all for $129.

I spend a lot of the time sitting in the living room in front of the big stereo while surfing with the laptop, but I still swap CDs when I listen to music because mom wouldn't stand for a patch cord running across the floor. Now I can beam iTunes directly over to the Airport Express and run a TOSLINK cable to the receiver with no loss in quality, and I can plug the Tivo into the Ethernet port to wirelessly bridge it to the main router. Throw in Bluetooth remote control using my phone with Salling Clicker, and the whole combo is hotter than sex-on-a-stick. Too bad it won't be out until mid-July. Hopefully I'll be able to grab one before I go back to Taiwan.