A while back, my out-of-warranty Macbook Pro's wireless antenna died. I had the card replaced; no dice. And unfortunately the antenna is in the screen, so to get working wireless back I would have had to get that replaced at a very high cost.

I went another way.

If you walk down the Networking aisle at Best Buy or Staples, which is what happens when you need a new wireless adapter in a hurry, you'll see that all the USB wireless dongles say they're for Windows only. Not a single one ships with a Mac driver, because I guess the Mac hardware is considered to be infallible or something. Maybe the cost-benefit analyses didn't show it to be worthwhile. Who knows.

Luckily, most USB wireless dongles are repackaged chipsets from other manufacturers. In particular, the Linksys AE3000 and a few other wireless-N models by manufacturers like Belkin are based on the Ralink (now Mediatek) RT3573 chip. I bought the Linksys AE3000 because of the build quality and speed capabilities.

Years ago, Ralink released some official drivers for Hackintoshes, which they've kept up-to-date. So after buying my Windows-only Linksys dongle, all I had to do was go grab the appropriate driver from their download page.

Or so I thought. You see, it turns out that the AE3000 didn't exist when the driver was written, so the installer doesn't know anything about it. You plug in your dongle, and nothing happens. What you actually have to do is install the driver and, before the final reboot after installation, go find the Info.plist file in /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/ and add some information about the manufacturer. (After some adventures with text editors, I found that it was best to do this using sudo nano in a terminal window.)

And this kind of ridiculousness is why open source operating systems are a good idea. Nonetheless, despite the convoluted technical steps, it works: I have a working wireless-N connection via my Windows-only wireless dongle (even after an upgrade to Mavericks). I hope this helps someone else - and that manufacturers start properly supporting Mac OS X.