Today, in the tech sphere, we’re quick to complain when something doesn’t work. That’s why I wanted to write this brief post to celebrate something that has served me well for a long time.

Last night, at 4:21 AM, the secondary AirPort Express base station (the older 802.11g model) quietly died. I had purchased this base station together with another identical one back in 2005. The other one died earlier this year. Save for 2–3 weeks every year during the summer holidays, these two little buddies have been in service for nine years, without interruption.

If you search the Web, you’ll probably find more than one discussion thread with people complaining about the poor build quality of these peripherals, their reliability and their generally short lifespan. I don’t know what to say. Perhaps it was sheer luck, but my experience has been quite the opposite, and these two base stations have proven to be long-lasting and absolutely dependable. So — cheers! Now I’ll put them on a shelf together with other Apple product boxes I still keep around.

Now the primary station is a new, second-generation AirPort Express 802.11n, and the second unit is a first-generation AirPort Express 802.11n. The latter has the same design as the older models pictured above, while the former has the same form factor of an AppleTV. I really prefer the older design, which I find more practical, but there wasn’t time to look for a used first-generation AirPort Express 802.11n.

Having two wireless base stations with similar broadcasting capabilities has increased my home network speed in a noticeable way, and now I hope this can contribute to mitigate the poor Wi-Fi performance of my MacBook Pro I mentioned previously.