Those clever fellows over at HardMac have a fairly incredible story on giving your CoreDuo MacBook 802.11n wifi support. If you haven’t been keeping up on this, the original MacBooks with CoreDuo processors support 802.11g, while the Core 2 Duo MacBooks of a more recent vintage also feature support for 802.11n, which is used by Apple’s latest AirPort Extreme. It seemed like buyers of the original MacBook would be left out in the cold here–or limited to external hardware options–but there’s now a way around that.

What HardMac discovered was that the AirPort card used in newer MacBooks cannot be used in older MacBooks–the newer cards have three antennae, versus two in the older ones. One Mac does use an AirPort card that fits in the original MacBooks, though, and that’s the Mac Pro. These cards can be ordered through an Apple Authorized Repair Center if you’re game to handle the non-trivial installation. Just to underscore that, the installation is not easy. You will need to do some pretty serious (and warranty-voiding) disassembly of your MacBook to make this work. If you need a detailed disassembly guide, we recommend site-sponsor iFixit’s instructions for the MacBook, which have saved us more than once (let us never speak of the Dr. Pepper incident again).

After using the software off the CD that comes with Apple’s new AirPort Extreme base station, performance was quite impressive in HardMac’s testing, with speeds of 8.9 MB/sec transferring between a wireless Mac and a Mac connected to the base station via ethernet.

Anyone planning to try this? We’d love to hear your thoughts or what you think in the comments!

Filed under: MacBook News, Wireless