"We are way better than the others" when it comes to ease of use, said Jai Chulani, a senior product manager at Apple. "Open the box. There are no rabbit-ear antennas to break off. We believe in a compact design that you can place anywhere in the home. And the beauty in setting it up [is that] we ship it with a very easy utility where in four or five clicks you can set up a secure network.

"You put in the stuff you care about: your wireless network name, your passwords and the way you connect -- that's all you need," Chulani said. "We've made it easy to set up this wireless secure network."

He went on to list the various improvements offered by the new base station, noting that it can operate in either the increasingly crowded 2.4-GHz band or the 5.8-GHz band, which promises less interference from other hardware and networks. "We provide an easy way for people to switch. Operating in 5 GHz can be useful in a 'noisy' environment. You have much more bandwidth. There's more space to play with, and each of these [wireless] channels is discrete [so] you've got a much cleaner environment....

"And when you set it in 5-GHz [mode], with 802.11n we do something called channel bonding that takes two adjacent channels" and uses them in tandem for better throughput, he said. "With the new base station, you get a huge increase in performance. We've done real-world testing, and you see about a five-times improvement in performance and a two-times improvement in range."

Not surprisingly, Apple wants to make sure that user networks are secure and offers several options to make sure that new -- and old -- hardware can still connect. "These new base stations support WPA2.... It's a better way to secure the network. You [use] eight characters [for the network password], and the software on both Macs and PCs will just take care of negotiating with the base station."