Apple Airport Expresses go POP after 14 months? | The Coffeehouse

eddwo
Wheres my head at?

One of my Airport Express units has suddenly failed. The led doesn't come on at all Both units were purchased at the beginning of last year and are only just outside of warranty.

Checking the Apple support forum show many people with the same problem, nearly all of them have died a very premature death just a few short weeks after their first anniversary.

I know the warranty only covers them for a year, but are do they seriously expect them to only last that long?

The device is a sealed unit so no repair seems likely. I now have a new £80 plastic paperweight to add to my collection.

Interestingly the last few characters of the serial number on the bottom of my unit are "KR4P", or is that just a coincidence ?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

eddwo wrote:
Interestingly the last few characters of the serial number on the bottom of my unit are "KR4P", or is that just a coincidence?

Comedy gem.

Anyway, Apple's products are rarely "sealed", and since its gone kaput, you could figure out how to open it (with a putty-knife a-la Mac Mini?) and replace the faulty bits with commodity bits taken from a Linksys/Netgear device, I understand they use the same PRISM chipset.

Karim
Trapped in a world he never made!

Maybe it's a tradition with Airports.

I was an earlier adopter of 802.11, and in the early days, the only affordable access point was the Apple Airport. Most vendors' access points were upwards of $1,000, whereas the Airport Base Station was $299.

Some guy had written a Java applet so that Windows users could configure them. (At the time, the only configuration tool Apple shipped was for Mac OS.)

They were hugely unreliable. They'd work great for months, and they you'd come home and the thing would just be sitting there with a red LED, and you were screwed. Once I had a friend with a Mac "fix" a broken one by flashing the firmware, but that was only a temporary fix -- a few weeks later it was dead again.

"No repair seems likely" -- ah, now you're beginning to understand... [6]

I did take a "dead" one apart once for fun, and found they had a Lucent Technologies WaveLAN PCMCIA card inside! Those PC Cards worked great -- I am still using one to this day. So at least part of it was reliable... Tongue Out