Saturday, 26 August 2006

Did A le change the signal strength scale with AirPort 4.2?

airport signal at lenox hotelSince I am in a hotel room with a reliable, but fluctuating wifi signal, I can't verify this, but Avi Flax wrote in with the following:

"I just i talled the just-released Airport Software 4.2 update, and after rebooting I noticed that A le seems to have changed the scale that the Airport icon uses to di lay signal strength. Before reboot, the icon was co istently at 2-3 bars. Afterwards, it's steady on 4, which should indicate a 100% signal, which made me a bit dubious. I doubted that the software update would have improved signal that much. So I launched the always-handy APGrapher, and verified that the signal strength hadn't changed at all, and was still around 40-45% - a far cry from the 100% that the Airport icon now implies.This doe 't actually bother me or anything, I just think it's worth noting. It reminds me of automakers removing oil pre ure gages from car dashboards because of people worrying about their oil pre ure, or making engine temp gages stay in the middle except in the case of emergencies. These changes were only made po ible by engines becoming much more reliable, so wirele technology may one day be able to eliminate signal gages in the same vein."

Can anyone else confirm this behavior?

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