Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Apple Snow Leopard and Windows 7 WiFi Compatibility Information

Will your Apple Macintosh compatible wireless adapter work with the upcoming Snow Leopard release from Apple? Will your Windows compatible adapter work with Windows 7?

As with any new operating system, we can't say for sure until it has been released and we have had a chance to test it. While products can be tested on betas or release candidates, that is not a good indicator of whether they will be compatible with the final version. In most cases, adapters will not be compatible until the chipset maker of the particular wireless adapter releases a new driver package.

Snow Leopard is set for a mid-June launch, and Windows 7 is supposed to be out in time for the holidays this year. Shortly after each one is released, we will get our hands on the new versions and do some testing. The results will of course be posted here on our blog.

We can say from past experience that chipset makers usually focus on making new Windows drivers first before updating their Macintosh drivers. So I guess it is a good thing the two are not launching at the same time. As a guidepost, Leopard 10.5 was released to the public on October 26th, 2007, and 10.5 drivers did not start to become available until late February of 2008. We will be working with the chipset makers to hopefully cut this time frame down a bit, but at the earliest (unless they are really on the ball), we would not expect Snow Leopard drivers to be available before August.

For Windows the turnaround time from the chipset makers is usually faster.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When will Rokland get snow leopard to tell whether the rokair adapter will still work?

Rokland LLC said...

We should have a Snow Leopard system within a week of the September launch date and then will post compatibility information for all of our Mac compatible adapters.