Apple, please describe the limited WPA2 support accurately

Question

The marketing description for the Airport Express normally say that the Airport Express supports WPA and WPA2. (See pretty much everyplace that sells it for proof.)
But buried in the footnotes of the Tech Specs is this:
"When joining an existing wireless network, AirPort Express supports only WPA-Personal. WPA2 requires a Mac computer with an AirPort Extreme Card and Mac OS X v10.3 or later. "
So many (and perhaps a substantial majority) of applications for the Apple Express cannot use WPA2.
It would save many hours of torture for Apple customers to be clearer about this, whenever WPA2 is mentioned.
Plus, it has some important ramifications. You generally can't get N wireless speeds on a network where clients use WPA.
Message was edited by: B Shore
Message was edited by: B Shore

Answer 1

Jolly Giant, I expect more good will be done by getting the word out here. It seems not to be as widely known as it should be, judging from the other unanswered-for-several-weeks question.
Tesserax, if that's what Apple means (that they're really talking about AES), then they should say more precisely what they mean. It's not actually helpful to guess, and really no offense intended but you clearly don't know enough about networks in the real world to opine on this. See below. (Given the huge diversity of network gear out there, it's near impossible anyway.)
But the point wasn't to get distracted about encryption, but to try to give people a heads up that they are not going to succeed in joining a WPA2 network. And if it is their own network, that they may want to consider how best to manage that - shift to WPA/TKIP, add an access point running WPA/TKIP, etc.
As far as "So many (and perhaps a substantial majority) of applications for the Apple Express cannot use WPA2." What that means is, many (perhaps most) people want to use the AE to join an existing network, at least some of the time. They can't if that network uses WPA2. That would be helpful for more people to know.
It is a little surprising, but this assumption turns out not to be reliably true:
"Enabling encryption on wireless networks will reduce the overall bandwidth in order to provide the necessary support for encryption communications. The stronger the encryption protocol, the greater the amount of overhead necessary."
Real world tests sometimes (often?) show the opposite. It probably depends on the hardware, as newer hardware will handle AES in hardware rather than in software. In any case, it turns out not to be the actual measured result - throughput can be higher with AES.
The key point there was actually that networks will not deliver N Wireless speeds unless one uses WPA2. They will limit themselves to 54mbps in many cases. See for example these articles:
http://blogs.techworld.com/war-on-error/2009/10/fast-wi-fis-little-secret---you- have-to-turn-on-wpa2-encryption/index.htm
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-basics/30664-5-ways-to-fix-slow -80211n-speed
You may want to Google some on these last two point (how TKIP and AES as well as WPA and WPA2 affect netwok throughput).
Message was edited by: B Shore