"We think it's a pretty solid draft, and we think it's in a good spot in terms of compatibility," he said. "We're making sure we do extensive interoperability testing. We understand that many of our customers have a mixed environment of Macs and Windows machines."

In fact, that describes my own home environment. I have an older Sony Vaio running Windows XP using 802.11g, a Core Duo-based MacBook Pro, also using 802.11g, and my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro using 802.11n. That means the base station is running in a mixed environment. So far, it's running perfectly -- no hiccups or dropped connections, and the range covers my entire house and beyond.

I haven't yet hooked up a hard drive, but I plan to do so in the next week or two and report back on how it works. I also plan to look at transfer speeds and range.

In the meantime, here's food for thought, sort of a "one more thing" to keep in mind. Apple is set with its next operating system release, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, to include a new backup app called . Until now, Time Machine didn't make much sense for laptop users, because it meant always having a hard drive connected to your computer -- and who wants to drag around a laptop with a USB or FireWire drive attached to it?

But with the new Airport base station and a perpetual wireless hard drive, Time Machine should be able to back up files to that drive -- as long as you're working on the network to which it's attached. (Apple won't comment on Leopard until it's released, which is expected by midyear.) To me, assuming I'm right, that's the best thing about the new hardware, the "wireless wow" of this release. Not only has Apple advanced the wireless world, it's now started users on the road to home storage networks.