Critical Monkey

I own an Apple Airport Express and have used it frequently while on the road for my old job in client offices (which sometimes got me in trouble) and hotels (which have horribly uncomfortable desks in most cases) to do what you would expect it to do - give me and a few coworkers a fast, easy to install WiFi network.

We would also use its USB printer port to create our own printing share. Nothing life changing there, but as a consultant we were often not given access to on-site network resources yet we always needed to print, so this was very helpful. I won’t go on a tangent about the ‘consultant’s toolkit’ I was putting together here, but the Airport Express was a handy part of said toolkit as it worked well and didn’t take up precious space in my already heavy carry-on.

One other feature it offers, which I’ve used a few times, is iTunes remote speaker audio-out. You can plug in an 1/8″ or micro optical cable and stream audio from iTunes (or other Mac or PC audio sources with some addon software) out to amplified speakers. This can be part of a basic but workable little audio system if you like.

Until recently, the only thing that could stream to this device was iTunes. iPods simply didn’t do WiFi, but the iPhone does. On top of that, the iPhone is incompatible with many standard iPod accessories like speaker docks and even standard audio cables. So why doesn’t Apple support iTunes remote speakers with an iPhone? It seems like a natural combination, and I honestly can’t think of any reason not to enable such support. Of course, owning an iPhone means you also use iTunes, but that option shouldn’t preclude another approach, especially if you want to play your music from your iPhone whenever there are remote speakers around. At a party, for instance.

But wait - there’s more:

What I want now is an upgraded Airport Express. One with DVI or HDMI (depending on how you want to bundle or separate audio and what adapters you want to include). The reason I want such a thing isn’t to stream iTunes video to a TV, though you would expect that that would be a reasonable, though potentially AppleTV defeating, application. I want video out so that I can plug the airport into a projector and use it as a remote screen for presentations at work.

I give lots of presentations, and sit in many, many more. It’s so old school to have to get a seat near the projector video cable, or to swap cables between presenters. inFocus, as well as a few others, already has WiFi built-in and add-on adapters for their projectors, so this isn’t a new idea. But where Apple always excels is in dead simple, always works, seamless integration. If Apple were to sell an Airport Express 2.0 with video out, and they were to enable it as a remote display, it would just work. I could have fewer cables to deal with, and un-tethered is always nicer.

But here’s where I think this would get insanely great.. Everyone in the room could have controlled/moderated access to the display. You could hand over display privileges to the person with the spreadsheet everyone wants to see, or the slideshow everyone has to sit through next without hassle. The same goes (even moreso?) for classroom use. Easy display connectivity to a room full of people would be very slick, from my perspective at least.

An even better potential, my super new iPhone could support this too. It’s still limited software wise, but there is no reason that I can see that it couldn’t run Keynote and become a full presentation system. I could take my iPhone, Airport Express 2.0, and nothing else - and give just as good a presentation as with a tethered laptop. Even better actually, because I could stand up, walk around, and control the display from my hand using all the handy multi-touch gestures the iPhone supports.

I can barely think of a person that I’ve worked with or near over the last few years that doesn’t lug lots of hardware all over the place just to put something up on a display or screen on a regular basis, and meetings often pause or break while people change seats, do all the cable swapping and all that other stuff that wireless remote display would eliminate.

So, Apple, how’s about a tiny little access point with audio and video out to make meeting logistics nice and simple? And then, why not unleash the handheld computing powers of the iPhone and lighten the physical loads of all the road warriors out there?