Tech IT Easy

January 16, 2008

Does Time Capsule hint about AirPort’s future?

Filed under: Apple, Business strategy, Consumer electronics, OSX, marketing — Kari Silvennoinen @ 4:48 pm

In last night’s (in European time) Keynote, Steve Jobs unveiled a batch of new products, though the rumored MacBook Air was the only that was truly interesting. What really surprised me, though, was Time Capsule. But not in any positive way.

As a Mac OS X Leopard, laptop and external hard drive owner, I was hopeful for a solution for wireless Time Machine back-ups. Apple had earlier implied this would indeed be feature of Leopard’s Time Machine when it was to be launched in October 2007. The feature, for unknown reasons, was dropped. Later, some hacks to do this sprang up on sites like MacOSXHints.com, but back-ups are the last thing you want to mess around with improvised hacks. Some sites were hopeful that this feature would be brought back in a later update to Mac OS X 10.5 or to AirPort Extreme.

Well. That didn’t happen – at least not in the way everybody expected. I’m also not going to believe that the reason is accounting-related like iPod Touch upgrade’s $20 price-tag. Of course, one could assume that the natural evolution for AirPort Extreme was to include a built-in hard drive (because of Time Machine), but why the name change? Why, all of a sudden, Apple’s WLAN-base station is called Time Capsule? It is 3 cm longer and wider than AirPort Extreme and it’s got a silver Apple logo on top, but otherwise it’s an AirPort (Extreme). They could’ve as well called MacBook Air the iPhone Air, because [they share the same kind of hard drive]. Are they killing off the AirPort brand? (Well, then again, where can you go from Extreme?)

So, 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, well, for the rest of us?

I could believe the reason why the feature was initially pulled as explained in the RouglyDrafted post. I think quite many Airport Extreme users are really, really disappointed right now as this new “Time Capsule”-thing is exactly the product they though they bought a long time ago. One would expect a $20 firmware upgrade to be in order, but hopeful dreams aside, this doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

This all, of course, is nothing new to the owners of AirPort Express, who have seen the support of AirTunes waning (Leopard’s Front Row doesn’t support it, for example) after the launch of poorly-received Apple TVs.

2 Comments »

  1. I think you’re pointing out an embarrassing gap in Apple’s service, for something that should involve a simple software-change. Maybe they will introduce it in 10.5.2?

    But I have to say, even though I set Time-Machine to back up to a partition on my laptop, I still haven’t found a single use for it yet and am considering to remove it when I need the space. The worst part of it is that when you add new data, it automatically starts to back that up and deletes old backups, where as I would prefer it to ask me whether I want to include that data. I’ve lost several weeks of back-ups that day and have never forgiven the software for that lapse (nearly sounds like I’m talking about a person…).

    Comment by Vincent van Wylick — January 16, 2008 @ 7:06 pm

  2. Looks the next update to Leopard will add the ability to “use a networked volume as Time Machine backup device.” I’m not sure if that includes over the air, but it sounds promising.

    Comment by Vincent van Wylick — January 21, 2008 @ 12:24 pm

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