Interesting AirPort Discovery

[Techno Child]

I'm just going to start out saying that I'm sure everyone already knew about this, but I haven't posted in awhile and some of you might find this as interesting as I did about 5 minutes ago...

I was in a destruction mode and I took apart one of my old iMac G3 CRT comps to see how it was put together, etc, etc... and after dismantling everything but the tube itself I caught my old airport base station in the corner of my eye and I wondered what was in it... I figured it's as good a time as any with the tools out and all - here's what I found...

Seems like Apple used a nifty device that connected a lucent brand pcmcia wireless card to the ethernet and modem ports... it has an AMD chip on the board... this is an old base station mind you, way before apple decided to move over to the intels and all that and I just thought it odd that an apple airport would use a pc wireless card and an amd chip. Why didn't they use their very own Airport pcmcia card???

-tc

 

[X-Istence]

Because the Airport cards that were PCMCIA and the current ones are from standard manufacturers as well. For example, the card in my MacBook Pro is an Atheros card. The cards in the MacBook's are Broadcom cards.

Apple has used different manufacturers for years now, it only makes sense. Why build an entire board from scratch when you can get reference designs and get your feet on the ground running.

The current base stations from what I remember reading about them are running on AMD chips as well with Atheros wireless cards.