Tim Higgins

The final standard is still over a year in the future and the Wi-Fi certification process for draft 11n products is about 3-5 months away. But companies are continuing to put this Beta-test-in-progress (which you, the consumer, are paying to participate in) into end-products beyond wireless routers and adapters. We've already seen draft 11n integrated into notebooks, and now Apple and D-Link have integrated it into networked media players.

The AppleTV announcement revealed that draft 11n capable hardware (from Atheros, it turns out) had already been integrated into existing Core 2 Duo MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Core 2 Duo iMacs (except the 17-inch, 1.83GHz iMac). All you need to do is run an "enabler" app, buy a new version of the Airport Extreme (in new Mac mini form factor) and voila, you have an interference generator for your 11b/g network. But something that Apple has done right is to put concurrent (or simultaneous) dual-band capability into its draft 11n products. This raises the cost, but also the flexibility since connections in both bands can be made at the same time.

In his CES keynote, Bill Gates introduced the Microsoft Home Server, but didn't provide many details. Thankfully, George Ou is also at CES and did a good drilldown with the Microsofties and spills some of the beans behind what makes the product tick.

The short story is that it is based on Windows Server 2003 R2 and has a "rich" admin GUI delivered to a Windows desktop and a not-so-fancy one for the riff-raff who choose to run another OS. Windows Server 2003 also powers some of Iomega's StorCenter Pro series NASes and they ain't cheap. And when Jim Buzbee looked at the StorCenter Pro NAS 200d/320GB with REV built-in, he found that some admin functions required dropping into Windows Remote Desktop.