sevenfeet

While this article is informative, I think there is information you are leaving out.

I'd give proper attribution to conversation about Mojave on Unsupported Macs being an active discussion hosted by Dosdude on Macrumors.com.  Yes, it's a competitor but much of the information needed to be successful about doing this patch is found in the pages and pages of discussion amongst the users as bugs are crushed and more machines are added to the compatibility (or partial compatibility) list.  It's no different than when you attribute a store broken by another website or news outlet.  Just referring to Dosdude's own download page doesn't get around that fact.

This makes perfect sense.  It's not that the screen itself is the secret to "Trutone".  Trutone apparently works with a calibrated light sensor on the MacBook Pro that gauges the ambient light ands makes adjustments to the known, calibrated screen.  Since Apple had a hand in building all of those external monitors (including the LG ones), it probably wasn't that hard to extend the technology to these external screens.  I suspect that you could do the same thing with other third party screens with the proper calibration information.

This article completely misses the point of why Airports are going away.  The reason is pretty simple.  It has everything to do with the advent of ISP-supplied wifi routers built into existing cable modems, DSL modems and fiber modems.  When that began happening and more importantly, when these add-ons became good enough for the masses, there wasn't much of a need for the third party market.  Ask yourself, how many friends and family do you know that solely relies on the cable modem provided by Comcast, Verizon or Time Warner?  This crowd that visits this website is a different kind of user.  But for the vast majority of the users out there, the ISP provided solutions were just fine.  In fact, advancements in wifi speed and antenna technology made these kinds of wifi routers give very good performance in most home and apartments regardless of where they were placed.  Only those of us with larger homes, difficult obstacles or desiring the latest in wifi gaming speeds/latency really needed to continue getting wifi from the traditional ways.

Looking back over the advancements of personal computing technology over the last 4 decades, we usually look at the beginning in the 70s with the first personal computers, the invention of the IBM PC and Mac in the 80s, GUI interfaces in the Wintel world in the 90s, the advent of the web combined with the Google search engine in the 90s/2000s and then the iPhone/smartphone in the 2000s.  But we often miss one extremely important event...the epoch of wireless communication.  We got modern laptops in 1990 (thanks Apple!) but if you wanted to communicate for email, AOL or the early web, you still needed a cable, which was most likely a phone modem in those days.  Thanks to Lucent Technology who invented Wifi (whose name was also missing from article), Steve Jobs saw an opportunity to give the Mac another compelling reason for adoption (remember, Apple in those days in the late 90s had still just escaped from going out of business).  Fresh off of the initial success of the iMac, Apple needed a hook to get buyers to the new lower priced iBook and when Steve Jobs saw wifi in the labs, he knew he had his hook.

When the iBook was announced and then the "one more thing" was that you could actually use the thing wirelessly (again, email, AOL, web), it was a jaw dropping demo.  Even better, it was a reasonably priced option for it and the Airport base station.  And while Lucent announced you could get the Orinoco wifi card for PCs, only the iBook (and later the Powerbook (Firewire) had it baked in with no drivers to install and an easy setup application.  Remember in those days, most people got their internet through dialup so the early Airports base stations could do that too.  And Apple wisely came out with an Airport base station configuration tool for Windows since for quite a while, the Airport was the only base station on the market and many PC owners (and even many companies) who adopted early technology bought them.  It was an instantly profitable line of business during days where Apple desperately needed the cash.

But most importantly, it was a new era of wireless communication.  We take it for granted now with wifi hotspots literally everywhere and global cellular communications.  But in the summer of 1999, Steve Jobs not only introduced this major piece of tech but he made it sizzle.  He showed how it was going to change the world and brought it to Apple's new low priced laptop, not the Powerbook line first.  Now wifi is everywhere in everything (even home appliances!) and wifi base station technology is delivered straight from the ISP in most cases.  The need for most people to own an Airport no longer exists.  And yes, its a sad day.

The reasons for Apple doing this are obvious.  They just weren't selling enough to continue this.  And the reason gets back to the major ISPs....Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, etc who all now include wifi routers with their cable modems.  You knew that sooner or later, this was going to be the result.  Why invest in an Airport when Comcast threw in a router already?  For 95%+ people, this was just fine.  That one hotspot did everything you needed.  A much small percentage of us needed additional features (multiple hotspots/mesh networks, gaming latency, etc).  And the other vendors were already moving down that path in a much smaller marketplace.  Apple, which had dominated the early wifi market 20 years ago was now in a position where Airport was just a rounding error in sales, but more importantly, no longer strategic in Apple's plans.

We may all grouse about the fact that this day has come, but it's a surprise to no one.  Apple has been telegraphing this day for a few years now.  We can reminisce about "the good ol days".  We can discuss that Apple single handedly brought wifi out of Lucent's labs and to the world in a compelling product.  We can talk about how many files have been saved by Time Machine/Time Capsule over the years and that Apple made backups easy enough for anyone.  We can talk about that Apple really made streaming household music a thing that anyone could configure and use without expert knowledge.  But the fact of the matter is that this day is upon us and it's time to move on.

Truly the end of an era.  The original gray saucer Airport was the first wifi router by ANYONE you could buy.  Many PC owners bought it since it was a unique product on the market for quite a while back in the 90s.  Yes, the guts were all Lucent technology...heck, if you cracked one open you saw a board with a Lucent PCMCIA card plugged into the slot.  You could buy that same card for PCs  The first Wifi capable iBooks (remember them?) pretty much had the same card but enclosed.

But then Apple took over primary development and the best part of it was that configuration was extremely simple.  Wifi for any other platform was ugly to install and configure and it's still not the easiest to do, at least on the server side.  Netgear, D-link and the rest of the bunch have never approached what Apple has done to make configuration as simple as Apple.  Even with Airport Extremes not as fast as some competing products now, i still recommended them to friends and family because of the ease of use and rock solid reliability.  They rarely broke and rarely crashed.  i still have one in the middle of my network.

And then there is the Airport Express which is a great little Airplay device even to this day.  I use one for my all analog 2 channel tube amp.