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This post might be rather meaningless to some. But for those of you who have first generation Macbook Pros, you may be interested at some point in upgrading to Wireless-N support. If you weren’t aware, we got gipped.

Well, our Macbook Pros came equipped with slower, hotter Intel Core Duos. The next round came with Core2 Duos and with a version of the Apple Extreme card that could be later upgraded to 802.11n. Yep! Ours were a limited bunch. I think they maybe shipped our models for around 6 months or so before making the big changes. Not that I’m really anal enough to track it down.

But I’m a techy kinda guy. I make my living learning newer ways to move much, much data in a short period of time. So for me, Wireless-N is a big deal. Not sure what it means? Let me explain.

802.11 is standard covering Wireless ethernet, or at least some of it. For the most part, this is what we are really talking about when we speak of Wi-fi. And as a standard, there are derivatives or changes that occur. These could be to target security or performance, etc. In this particular case, I’m interested in speed.

802.11b was my first real interaction with this. I can remember getting an Apple Airport back in the late 1990′s when they first came out. Back then, Apple had the lowest cost access point by far. Many of the other brands cost more than $1000. My Airport was less than $200. And I used some pretty inexpensive Orinoco PC cards in my laptops. Little did I know that those Orinocos were also inside the Airport. But that really doesn’t matter. It was cheap and relatively fast back then at 11Mbits/sec.

A couple years later some faster solutions began popping up. They required some new equipment to take advantage of speed. The problem was that it wasn’t very backward compatible with the 802.11b stuff. This 802.11a spec really seemed to suck. I’m glad I didn’t invest into it. Right on top of its release was the release of 802.11g. Now this stuff was also 54Mbit/sec like the 802.11a stuff. But it was also backward compatible with everything else. Nice, huh? I like it when folks are kind enough not to obsolete my purchases.

But now we’re in the age of 802.11n. And the newest Macs are equipped with it. You just have to buy the software enabler from Apple for $1.99. And for those of you with older Macbook Pros (btw, mine isn’t even a year old yet), this enabler won’t work for you. It’ll tell you that you don’t have compatible hardware. So, what would you do?

Well, if you first thought was to go buy a new Airport Extreme card from Apple, good luck! At least I haven’t found them on their website yet. Nope. Just the older 54Mbit stuff. I want the fast stuff— the > 200Mbit/sec stuff. Anyway, I looked all over the place for anyone advertising drivers for Mac OS X. There are a number of cards available from Linksys, Netgear, Buffalo, and a couple others. Sure, I wasn’t too crazy about having some thingy hanging out of my laptop, but I counted the costs. But it didn’t matter. I could find anyone in open source boasting about getting such a card to work. This was quite disappointing.

Eventually, I did find a solution. It came via QuickerTek. They offered an upgrade to the Airport Extreme shipped in the Macbook Pro. And this upgrade wouldn’t protrude from my laptop. But the solution does come at a price. Besides the need for a router upgrade, you’ll need to fork out another $149 for this upgrade. Honestly, I think there are more expensive upgrades one can make. This still seamed worthwhile.

Now, if this is something you’d like to do, you will need to pay a little attention. In your upgrade kit, you’ll receive some decent instructions for taking off the keyboard. I’m pretty convinced you’ll need to remove every single screw. No joke on that one. Despite all the screws, this isn’t a big deal. And everything fits together pretty easily. But once you get the hardware swapped out, you’ll need to revisit that Software Enabler from Apple, the one that didn’t work at first. You’ll want to download and open up the .dmg package to reveal Airport Extreme 802.11n Enabler.pkg. Copy this .pkg file to your desktop, by dragging it from the disk image. The reason for this is that you’ll need to make a change to one of the files and then run the installer. If you keep this package inside the disk image, it’ll remain read-only.

The file you’ll want to make changes to is within the Contents folder. You won’t see that unless you do a right-click on the package file. But don’t double click on it. That will launch the installer. Instead, right-clicking will reveal the menu option “Show Package Contents”. Inside the Contents folder, you’ll see a file called Distribution.dist. You’ll need to open this file using your Text editor. Once you’ve done that, look for the following line:

(property == “MacBookPro2,2″) ||

You’ll want to change this to read the following:

(property == “MacBookPro1,1″) ||

This will cause the installer to recognize your version of Macbook Pro as a valid upgrade model. Save the file with your changes and then go back to the top level .pkg file. Double click it and start the upgrade process. You’ll have to reboot for your changes to take effect, but that should be expected.

And that’s pretty much it. Hope it works well for you.

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