I suppose I wouldn’t say that the AirPort Express has faded into obscurity, but it sure hasn’t gotten a lot of love recently. That may be in part because though it’s a great little product, it’s still got its fair share of problems. While visiting a friend the other night, he complained that his wife’s year and a half old AirPort Express no longer let them send music to their stereo. The base station part seemed to work fine, but the pop-up menu for the speakers in iTunes had disappeared.
Using the AirPort Admin Utility and Setup Utility, I did some investigating but wasn’t able to even find an option to enable AirTunes. At one point I noticed that upon loading up the Admin Utility, there were a bunch of tabs at the top of the screen that would appear for a second and then disappear. One of them, I could tell, read “Music.”
Huh. So I turned to my favorite source of confirming Apple woes: the support discussion forums. A little digging turned up no less than three separate threads on people with missing Music tabs in Admin Utility and a missing AirTunes menu in iTunes. The consensus seems to be that the audio portion of the Express just conks out, and needs to be repaired. Since the warranty is expired, that repair is likely going to be costly. All for a device that’s a year and a half old.
Coming on the heels of questions about Apple’s QA, this news isn’t exactly reassuring. Then again, every problem is an “isolated issue” until it happens to you.
