Needing a new laptop, I did some research, talked with friends, and purchased a Macbook Air on Saturday. It’s gorgeous, and makes me feel more hip just being near it. The problem is: its network speed is very, very slow. Whereas the other machines on my home network reliably get 15mb/s, the Macbook stumbles along at 500kb/s – that’s 1/30th of the normal speed. This is apparently a known issue at Apple, which is causing some frustration on the support forums. There was a time in the early years of my nerdy career when I didn’t mind spending hours troubleshooting network stacks and bursting bitrates, but I don’t have that luxury now. Computers are supposed to work, right out of the box – especially when they are aesthetically designed so thoughtfully. I’m sure I can work-through this hiccup, but it’s worth noting that Apple’s $600 share price does not translate into universally quality products…
3 Replies to “My new Macbook: cute, but stupid?”
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Postscript: I bought a new router. The guys at BestBuy now my BFFs. All of my problems are solved; I want for nothing.
So it was the way your old router interacted with the Mac? Strange…
Yes. Apparently my router – very vanilla, maybe three years old – did not mesh with the network card of the Macbook. It works fine with the other devices/computers in the house, but not the Macbook. I suspect I will run into this problem again from time to time in coffee shops …