Unfortunately, Drew Robison at Apple wrote to me in July 2003 to tell me the replacement program has been discontinued.
APPLE AIRPORT REPLACEMENT SERIAL NUMBER
Apple used to replace broken, out-of-warranty base stations with like models under a semi-secret program that initially only covered units in the serial number range from PW940.Some credit card companies automatically double the warranty coverage of products you bought with their credit cards (typical of "Gold" and above).AppleCare telephone support people may not know this, but confirm it once they check, so if If you bought an Apple laptop with an extended service plan, the base station is covered as a "peripheral", regardless of when you bought the base station.When you call (In the US: 1-80), select technical assistance (option 1), then option 3 (thanks Rick Tom Greever). If your base station is broken but still under warranty, get on the phone at once and get a replacement sent to you.However, your first strategy should be to get Apple to replace the unit rather than repair it yourself. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky: According to this thread at Slashdot (Thanks Benjamin!), capacitors failures have been known to result in everything from explosive failure to outright fires. For example, Benjamin Feist encountered the same sort of problem in a 3COM HomeConnect 10/100 5-port ethernet hub and has posted similar repair instructions (i.e. Japanese capacitors manufacturers are sure to be happy, now that component buyers are once again willing to pay 4x more for Japanese versus Taiwanese-manufactured capacitors.įurthermore, these sorts of capacitor failures are not limited to Lucent, Apple, or ABIT gear. Is it coincidence then, that the first version of Graphite ABS' sport Taiwanese-made Lelon capacitors, while repaired (or later) Graphite ABS' have Japanese-made Sanyo capacitors? This Toronto Star article describes similar failures with ABIT motherboards for PCs. It is alleged that botched Taiwanese industrial espionage caused HP apparently also uses this motherboard for the HP 802.11b Wireless LAN Small Business Access Point.įor an riveting read about the background of these capacitor failures,Īrticle. Click this link for an image of the guts of a RG1000. The motherboards inside these Lucent units look exactly the same as the ones found in Airport base stations. These repair instructions should also help owners of similar wireless base stations manufactured by Lucent technologies (AP-500, RG1000, and RG1100). The repair was much cheaper and easier than I thought. Hence, I investigated what led to the early death of my base station. My unit was out of warranty, Apple told me they would not replace it, and I did not feel like spending another $300 unless I had to. but I am in Australia.Early in 2001, my loyal Base Station at home gave up its ghost and started to cycle endlessly (red light at left, 3 amber, rinse, repeat). you do need DIY skills but it is not hard. For car use there are projects to use a 12v power supply. There are projects around to repair all the different Express by replacing the power supply. since nothing but the Express can manage client mode to 3rd party wifi. That might mean using power line adapters, or really using ethernet or even a nice Gen5 Extreme as mothership to the Express which might complicate your wireless network if you moved on from Apple products. My recommendation if you want to use Airport Express still (as there is very little in the way of replacement products to do what you want. That matches when Apple dropped using Qualcomm wireless at least in the Macs and Airport Extreme Gen4 (A1354) (broadcom in 2011 Extreme Gen5) very solidly across the range.
N wireless device that was released in 2012 (assuming you are talking about Gen2) that used design that goes back to Gen1 (2008) with slightly upgraded Atheros (by then Qualcomm) chipset to dual band simultaneous. Is the airport express a little under-powered in the wifi department?