the iphone does not play well with others (on wifi)

So... the owner of the macbook pro decided to join the iphone cult, grabbing a 16gig 3G iphone. Brought it home, connected to the home wifi - no worries, right?

Then she connected the mbp, and things just went to hell. The mbp refused to connect to the wifi at all... Pretty much anything connected to the network got booted.  Every device on the network had to be restarted or reconnected to the network. The router itsef had to be unplugged and hard rebooted.

None of this was happening pre-iphone; and everything works as normal so long as the iphone isn't connected.

So, WTF? She googles a bit and finds a bunch of - as she put it - "infuriating" posts where people ask for help with this problem and just get the reply "oh... that's weird". For extra points lots of people suggest throwing away your perfectly good router and buying an airport, because, hey, the apple hardware you have already isn't working so why wouldn't you want to buy more of such quality product? Surely, all problems must reside in the non-apple hardware?

I have to say it, macheads: as a community you are incredibly unhelpful trying to bugfix things. If the machine deviates from the script, people throw up their hands and mumble things about going to see a genius or just buying some more apple products. I wonder occasionally if that's just to appease the great god stevepjobs in the hope the devices will spontaneously start working again.

Just another day, sharing the mac experience.

So it goes back and forth, and it seems that what happens is that the macbookpro and the iphone boot each other off the network whenever they connect. Even worse, they manage to start booting off the PC which was minding its own business on ethernet; and pretty soon we're having trouble finding a device that can still connect to the router to try to run some diagnostics.

Near as we can tell, the iphone and the mbp are just so aggressive in their search for connectivity that they kill existing connections. For some reason adding the iphone into the mix was the trigger to really mess things up.

A couple of reboots and some restrained profanity later, we seem to have found a fix: reserve IP addresses for every device you have. At the router level, that is. We started by setting the iphone to a fairly high address that hadn't ever been  used, and manually setting the iphone to that fixed IP - not sure if that made a lick of difference, but we did it.

So far, so good. Wish us luck, we'll see what happens tomorrow.