I meantioned in another hub that Apple's Mac OS X Leopard has had many reports of connectivity issues. I suffered from these issues myself. I sorted a few of them out by using Open DNS, but not all of them. Plus, that didn't take into account the fact that the eMac was working fine on the WiFi network and the MacBook was not.

As a Christmas present to myself, I recently grabbed a new Airport Extreme router to replace my Original Airport (the space ship shaped one). What can I say, they were on sale, I had a coupon - it all worked out. The weird part is that is that all of my networking problems were solved simply by plugging it in and turning it on, from stability to signal strength.

This disappoints me. Sure, I love having the ease and simplicity of Mac use back, but I should have had that with the old style space ship router, which was working completely fine. Does this mean that people who also have an older, perfectly fine Airport who have saved up to get Leopard will be forced to ditch their old faithful router or run the risk of keeping it and having a (shudder) Windoze style, never-working-well experience?

There are several things that have happened since the release of Leopard that makes me frown in Apple's general direction. They have made a few bad marketing decisions, there have been complaints about their attention to detail on the Leopard project, and they have still not addressed the network connectivity and other issues in spite of repeated complaints from users.

Do I regret switching to Leopard? Absolutely not. It's several steps above Tiger in most things, it's gorgeous, and I love using it. I just didn't like the amount of time it took EACH DAY to mess with the network when I had the original Airport hooked up. The original airport which was working beautifully with every other Mac OS it came in contact with.

I think Apple is missing the chance to fix this before it becomes a marketing nightmare for them. That is uncharacteristic of Apple's usually stellar service, and too bad, really.