First, lay out a soft cloth, put your Mac face down, and undo the access door on the back. While Geek Technique installed this AirPort hack into an iBook, I tried it in an iMac G3. Power Mac G4 with AGP graphics, but not the FireWire 800 Power Mac G4. iMac G3, 350 to 700 MHz, AirPort Card adapter required. 2002 eMac G4 700/800 MHz (this is the original eMac before the ATI Graphics). Titanium PowerBook G4, 400 MHz to 1 GHz. There are a number of machines that accept original AirPort cards: While the AirPort and Orinoco Silver cards are the same, there is something about the AirPort slot that is obviously different. What I found interesting was that while the Orinoco Silver card worked in the AirPort slot in my 400 MHz PowerBook G4, it would not work in the PC Card slot. Intrigued by this, and with my ever growing taste for hacking hardware, I decided to give it a go. There are a number of Orinoco cards: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. (I have tried the exact same iBook and card, and I could not get the keyboard back in place in a usable fashion.) To prove this, they fitted a stripped down Orinoco Silver card into an iBook G3, and it worked. Geek Technique found that the Orinoco Silver range of 16-bit PC Cards were exact matches for the original AirPort Card. With that information, it is easy to see a cheaper alternative. 
(See WiFi PC Cards Compatible with PowerBooks for a list of cards that includes chipset information.) Apple’s AirPort Card is basically a repackaged Broadcom-based PC Card.
The guy over at Geek Technique took a further look into what the original AirPort Card was made of. Newer Macs use 802.11g AirPort Extreme Cards, which are still sold by Apple, and more recently Apple has implemented the next stage in its latest range of Intel machines, 802.11n. Ever since Apple stopped selling them, there are less and less of them around – and everyone wants them.Īs a way to make a Mac wireless, AirPort is superb in every way. Original AirPort Cards are expensive nowadays.
I first started looking into alternatives to the Apple AirPort Card when a friend of mine had a slot-load iMac G3 and the original 802.11b AirPort Card was the only option to go wireless – other than USB dongles.
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