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As an Apple Mac fan that doesn’t think Steve Jobs is close to God and can do no wrong I rather fatuously enjoy it when he makes a very public mistake. At yesterday’s MacWorld keynote, Jobs unveiled ‘Time Capsule’, which is, basically, nothing more than an Airport Extreme box with a WiFi card and a big hard disk in it for dedicated ‘Time Machine’ 1 use. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a good and an obvious product for Apple to market and they haven’t priced it too badly either. But Uncle Steve must have been thinking about the mistake he made last year when he announced it.
Last year, when Leopard feature ‘Time Machine’ was announced, Jobs stated quite clearly that users could hook up an ‘AirDisk’ 2 for it’s use. Indeed, early development editions of Leopard reportedly had this feature available. But when the final version was released the feature had somehow disappeared. Apple fanboys everywhere deduced that the code must have been unstable so good ‘ol Steve took it out and it would come later in an update. The more cynical amongst us, figured that somewhere along the line it had dawned on Steve that disabling the feature and then coming up with a nice shiny box that would allow it could be a good source of revenue. No problem with that – that’s business. His mistake, of course, was the transparency with which he went from free to $300.
1 For those people who live in a world where an Apple is simply a piece of fruit – Time Machine is, actually, a rather nifty program. Hook up an external hard disk to your Mac, turn Time Machine on and you get continuous and incremental backups of your system. You don’t need to do a thing. You can easily restore an entire system to, say, what it was like at 3pm last Wednesday or retrieve any file mistakenly deleted from any point in time.
2 AirDisk is an external hard disk that plugs directly into the Apple Airport extreme wireless base station that can then be used by any Mac (or PC) on the network as a storage device. It’s a great idea. Sadly, as anyone who comes here may have seen before, I have never managed to get it working without losing my internet connection and having very slow write times. But others have.
[...] what happened? Is the reason as cynical as what Yellow Swordfish says and this was Apple’s plan all along and we’ll never see a firmware update enabling this, [...]
Andy,
I have been considering replacing my router, airport and adding NAS, and so far I think Asus have the best option… http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/102283/asus-wl700ge.html
but I’m waiting for it to gain a gigabit hub.
I built my own pc about a year ago and it was clear how well thought out and well made the the Asus motherboard was.
NAS? ‘Nucleophilic Acyl Substitution’? Nah! must be ‘Network Attached Storage’!
What I got wrong in this item is that I hadn’t realised the box was actually a full Airport Extreme Base Station. I thought it was just a wifi ‘device’ as such. This makes me convinced that we wont see the proper support built in to Leopard and that it probably worked all the time.
Aside from the rather stingy hard disk size, the Asus looks pretty good.
You can replace the HDD yourself, the top comes off and without voiding the warranty, but I agree 500Gb is nearer the mark.
A question…….
What is the real difference between "Time Capsule" and "Apple TV" and a "Mac Mini", so why the hell can’t I buy a Mac Mini with HDMI, wireless hub, built in Freeview Tuner, DVD upscaling and RAID 1 HDD setup. One slinky little box on a shelf in the front room with everthing on it.
I just hooked up my new Time Capsule yesterday, and I keep getting disconnected from the internet. Â The Time Capsule light is green and all the lights on the modem are green when this happens. Â I have Verizon DSL with a PPPoE connection. Â I’ve noticed that there are several wireless networks in my neighborhood. Â Could any of these be causing interference? Â Three times Verizon tech support guys were unable to solve my problem. Â The Apple Support discussion has many posts by guys with unstable internet connection using Time Capsule. Â Some of them disconnected all their widgets from Dashboard, and that seemed to work. Â Why would that make a difference? Â And if it does, how do I do that? Â (I’m a grandma, not a techie.)
Well I went out and bought one just yesterday so maybe this weekend I’ll see if I have a dud or not.
I took my ailing Time Capsule back to the Apple Store and got a new one in the box. So far, so good.
I was gonna say “Sorry for digging this post up” – but now I’m going to say “sorry for digging this post up and pointing out that you didn’t need to buy a Time Capsule – Apple has enabled the ‘AirDisk’ – well it has according to this article :—-
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=1950
Then scroll down to Two Storage Options – official and not.
I had a look at a Time Capsule in Apple Solihull, when I commented on how hot the TC on display was-everybody said ” that’s not hot – only warm, then we found out the TC on display is only a router – the HDD is not active, then checking Apple Support Pages and the long list of problems reminded me of my “Apple Hardware Promise” – never buy a first gen piece of Apple hardware – always give them 6 months !
Gggrrrrrrr…
Just a thought, does the HDD on the TC run all the time, or does it spin down when not in use ?
@Malc: I haven’t tried it yet. But I have had a hard disk attached USB to my iMac using TM and that spins down when not being written to.
Could you post when you find out ? The Apple Store operatives were not impressive in their depth of knowledge, I’m beginning to reconsider plan A, put an old Pentium 3 powered beige box in the loft, and use that for network storage.
@Malc: Will do…
Malc – Yes – it spins down when it’s not writing. Set it up today – worked first time and my iMac already fully backed up. It’s fast!
Andy,
Thanks for the email and update.
Malc