“Apple Computer joined a growing band of companies giving the cold shoulder to 802.11a, marking another setback for the wireless standard designed to replace 802.11b as the dominant way to create home and office wireless networks.
The Mac maker has no plans to make wireless networking equipment using the 802.11a standard, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide hardware product marketing, said Wednesday. Instead, it plans to add 802.11g technology into the next generation of its laptops, he said. ‘802.11a makes no sense–no sense at all,’ Joswiak said. ‘There’s no conceivable (802.11)a market.’
802.11a wireless has hit an insurmountable roadblock, said Will Strauss, an analyst at market research firm Forward Concepts. Strauss said the market has spoken already: Fewer than 100,000 of the tens of millions of Wi-Fi chips shipped in 2002 were for 802.11a modems or access points.
‘There’s little need for 802.11a,’ Strauss said,” reports CNET News.com here.
They are helping to kill DVD+R as well. Didn’t apple help kill 5 1/4″ floppies as well?
Hooray!
OOO ooo EEE eee
what? thought dvd-r/cdrw drives are on most macs already
These comments have nothing to do with the story. 802.11.a is one of the competing fast wireless networking standards but it isn’t compatible with 802.11.b. 802.11.g (Airport Extreme) is fast and backwards compatible.
I think SwitchMonkey is saying that Apple has favored the DVD-R format over DVD+R.
Isn’t microsoft supporting 802.11a? It’s probably a little premature to claim Apple has killed it if Microsoft is going to support it. But I guess if it gets your web site a few hits you’ll go ahead and make whatever wacky claims you want.
It’s hardly wacky. Apple helped USB adoption immensely with the iMac, invented FireWire, killed the floppy (after introducing it years ago), etc. Apple leads, Wintel follows, as usual – as SteveJack has written before.