Apple's Airport Setup Assistant

No, this is not an April Fool's Day Joke. For that I set a few of the company HP Laserjet Printers to change from reading "Ready" to "INSERT COIN" via a nifty perl script. :) (for the record only the older HP Laserjets with the small green and black LED screens say "INSERT COIN" the newer multi-function touch-screen HP LaserJets say "Insert Coin for Copies". I might change them later.)

Anyway, back to the story. I fired up a nifty spread spectrum 2.4 and 5 Ghz analyzer last night at the house and saw a bit of noise and interference on the channel were my Airport Express resides. "No problem" I thought, "I'll just fire up the Airport Setup Utility and quickly change the AP channel from 6 to 11" (more and more of my neighbors are getting on the wireless bandwagon, even out in the sticks. I could be forced to move to 802.11n on 5 Ghz shortly.)

Upon firing up Airport Setup Assistance I was most dismayed to find that, like the setup for Apple's Time Capsule, the Airport Express can no longer be directly manipulated with access to all the advanced features. You are first presented with the "dumbed down" setup and then only if you really know where to click can you get to the "Advanced" setup (which really isn't) where you can change some settings but others seem to have disappeared entirely.

I'm not a big fan of this change and I wish the good people of Cupertino would simply change things back to the way they were, or at least provide some kind of option for "Classic Advanced Setup" for those of us who know what we're doing.