I have recently set up a few new Macs using the Migration assistant. Each one naturally has its own set of unique preferences for the migrated user accounts, and also naturally, migration to the new machines involves its own set of unique preference changes inherent with the new hardware.

Case in point: my new 8-core MacPro has no Airport card. My previous 4-core MacPro did. I used it from time to time to jump on the neighbor's network when ours went down. I kept the Airport icon in my menu bar for handy access. When I migrated to my new machine, the Airport icon stuck around, despite the new machine's lack of an Airport card.

Well, when you don't have an Airport card, you don't have an obvious preference setting to turn off the needless icon. To make matters worse, Apple's help documentation refers to some non-existent, fairy tail options that are no where to be found in the OS:

Step one says to go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and click AirPort in the list.

The OS X system preferences have never been in a list format. They have more or less looked exactly like this for the past 7 years:

Also, if my memory serves me right, there has never been an Airport Preference pane, much less an option to add more preference panes through the use of a + icon.

In my frustration, I was too specific when searching for a solution over the internets and was left to my own devices to solve my problem. Then it finally occurred to me that you can drag menu bar icons around by holding down the command key. I figured that if you can reorder them, you can probably also just drag them off, and sure enough, you can!