I don’t get excited about technology much any more. This is very intentional, because I know that if I let myself get excited about technology, I’ll once again start exceeding my tech budget. So I put the blinders on.

Well, today I got an Airport Express.

Wow, this is cool. What’s so amazing about it is its simplicity and ease of use. It’s a wireless access point, but it’s more than that. Right now, I have it plugged into my stereo, and the music that I’m playing on my laptop is coming out of the stereo over there, via the wireless network. This took all of 2 minutes to set up, most of which time was spent fumbling around behind the stereo trying to figure out where to plug in the “line in” cable.

Primarily, though, I’ll be using it so that I can take wireless networking with me as I move around campus. Anywhere there’s a network jack, I can have a wireless network in a few seconds.

What impresses me so much about Apple is not that they are doing anything particularly innovative, but that everything they do is *so* easy to use. Computers should make easy things easy and hard things possible. I should not have to think about how things work. Plugging it in should be the hardest step. And in the case of this little device, it was.