Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So, what we have here is a Bose Wave radio/CD player, with the add-on pedestal that provides wi-fi capability and AirPlay streaming. The Bose Wave is a Bose Wave; you know how they sound and how they work. I like them, I own one, and my review will focus on the "upgrade" from my existing Wave III to this system. Or rather, my attempted upgrade. I'm also not going to focus, in this review, on the fact that it never actually managed to connect to my wifi network. Bose declared it defective, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that. They also bungled the return, but that review is for the seller, not the item, and I've already written it. The question for this review is whether you should replace your existing Wave III with this model, or whether you should pay the $100 premium over the Wave III pricing for this model. What you get for your extra $100 is the pedestal you see under the radio itself, which connects via the proprietary "BoseLink" port to the radio, and provides the wireless functionality. In order to set it up, you must download and install a proprietary application from Bose, the Mac version of which is laughingly amateurish (the installer, for instance, says that "My Project" wants to make changes to your system, indicating they didn't bother to change the name of the project when creating the application; this is akin to sending out a resume called "New Document"). You connect your laptop (yes, you need a laptop, or at least, a computer on your wifi network and within a USB cable's length of the radio, and it must be the computer from which you mean to stream music -- see below) to the pedestal and open the app. It connects to the pedestal, and you provide your network signon information. Why this couldn't be done via a web browser, we don't know. You also have to create an account with Bose, for no reason that I could determine. After installing the application, you will have a new application running all the time on your computer, the "Soundtouch Music Server." You may ask, "Doesn't Apple already make software for serving music?" Yes, they do. It's called iTunes. Apparently Bose didn't know this and wrote their own instead. This software must be running on the computer you wish to stream music from. "Wait!" you say. "THE computer? You can only stream from one computer? Doesn't Airplay allow you to stream from any system?" Yes, it does. I don't know what this server does or why they require you to install it. In any case, once you complete all this, the pedestal then connects to your wifi network. If it doesn't, you will soon find yourself on your hands and knees squinting into a tiny hole looking for the world's smallest status light, as you hold down an unlabeled "control" button. At that point, you may find yourself wondering why you're going through this ridiculous rigmarole. The back of every Bose Wave system has an "Aux" port for an external sound source. Apple sells a $95 device called an Airport Express, which you plug into any outlet and configure quickly and easily without amateur-hour software. The AX has an audio jack into which you plug a standard (not proprietary, not expensive) 1/8" stereo cable. You plug the other end of that cable into the Aux port of your Bose Wave. The AX shows up as an AirPlay device on all your AirPlay-capable systems, and you are now able to stream music from any of them to your Bose Wave. No ugly pedestal. No "Bose Link" cable. No proprietary application. And it takes less time to set up than it will take you to reach the first (of five) representatives you need to reach before you can return this overpriced item. Save yourself the trouble. Bose does some things well, but wireless connectivity is not one of them.