The team over at Gizmodo has wasted no time—har-dee har—in getting their hands on one of Apple’s new Time Capsule devices. Their initial reports suggest all is as to be expected in Capsule-land, but I noted one interesting point from Wilson Rothman’s post that will be sure to have AirPort Extreme owners frothing at the mouth:
But say you buy the 500GB Time Capsule, and want to use an external 1TB drive to do all your serious backing up. When you connect it via USB, it is automatically visible in both the AirPort Utility and the Time Machine on your Mac.Whoa, whatchu talkin’ bout, Wilson? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that exact same feature that went MIA from the AirPort Extreme? That my colleague Peter Cohen just wrote about this week? What gives?
Much as I wish I had an answer for this perplexing question of the ages, I got nothing. I would have hoped that a firmware patch for the AirPort Extreme would be forthcoming, but Apple’s playing this one close to the vest.
Perhaps there will be a $20 add-on for current Extreme owners...
Did he try a restore? My understanding is that you can use a hack to back up to an Airport Disk, but good luck restoring from it.
More likely it does work, in which case there is no longer an excuse. Obviously it requires nothing more than a firmware update. Tick-tock Apple. Don't think you need to wait until Tuesday to release this.
re: $20 add-on
Good one!
@Dave-O: I don't know that he tried the restore, but my understanding was that this wasn't using the existing hack, but rather just a capability of Time Capsule out of the box. We'll certainly keep an eye on it.
Apple refuses to acknowledge that this is a real problem. Their support reps claim that they never advertised this feature, it is not supported. I got the clear impression it is not being worked on and they have no plans to make this right.
If you own an Airport Extreme, especially if you bought it just for this feature like I did, call them and let them know that this is not acceptable. Have them open a "case" for you and leave it open pending resolution.
1-800-275-2273
Dan Moren: Just confirmed this by plugging USB drive into Time Capsule. Works.
Fletcher: They never advertised this feature, if you want to be pedantic, which Apple does in this case. They listed it as a feature subject to change in promoting Leopard before its release. (Peter Cohen notes that Steve Jobs was much broader in his promotion of the feature at WWDC.)
But AirPort Extreme wasn't sold as a Time Machine backup device; Leopard was advertised before release as having this feature.
It's a shame. I'm guessing since Time Capsule supports USB backups, we're going to see something from Apple: a revised base station or a firmware upgrade.
You know, it could be a bug in Time Capsule. Perhaps the USB drive is not supposed to show up in Time Machine. After all, there has been speculation that the reason the feature is disabled on the Airport Extreme is because of stability issues due to the kinds of network hard drives which can be connected.
Wow, that really is crap. I suppose you could argue that while Airport Disk backup was shown as a feature of Leopard, it was pre-release, and pre-release features should generally be taken with a grain of salt. But you can't deny that Apple benefited from all those people who picked up Airport Extremes based on that "promised" feature. They should do something to make it right.
I'm not going to sue Apple, so I care little for the pedantics. The guy at Apple made said a lot of times how he had never seen the keynote with the promise of compatibility in it, how he had never seen the Web page in question. I could care less.
What I do know is that I visited the Web site and saw this listed as a feature. I watched the keynote and heard this touted as a feature. I spoke to Apple salespeople and was told this was a feature. How much research am I expected to do?!
I advocate nothing more than calling them, a lot, until they pull their heads out of where ever it is they have lodged them and fix the damn thing.
@Alex: "Perhaps the USB drive is not supposed to show up in Time Machine." I contacted Apple and they confirmed this is a supported feature in Time Capsule. I'm writing Macworld's First Look, due up shortly, and review, due up next week, so watch for more details.
@fletcher: "What I do know is that I visited the Web site and saw this listed as a feature."
Right, and Apple made a huge blunder promising something even with the disclaimer that features can change. Somebody's head may have rolled, but I can't believe Steve Jobs was happy about this.
(Compare this to Microsoft: In 2003, there were five pillars of Longhorn, Vista's codename. Two of the pillars disappeared by 2007; the remaining one, Aero, is pretty lame compared to the stuff that was removed. WinFS was really superbly interesting and useful -- Spotlight and a vast amount more. So it's interesting that a single small but useful feature dropped by Apple provokes so much outrage, when an entire OS can be scaled back at Microsoft and people shrug. Probably explains XP's continuing popularity.)
This isn't a fiasco as bad as Longhorn, but Copland sure was :)
@Glenn Fleishman
How do two wrongs make a right? Just because MS messes up badly Apple is allowed to mess up less badly? That makes no sense. Any blunder should be tackled by the consumer. If MS consumers don't want to bitch about their missing promises that's their problem. I'm still mad about this situation and I'm going to continue to voice it.
I will make this short & to the point .
Either extreme owners get a firmware
update or Jobs lied to us all .
Perhaps Steve thought about it after the fact or one of his sidekicks said, "Hold on to that feature. You know we can combine the Apple TV and the Airport Extreme and make a glorified AE with the auto backup feature then make more money." What do think Steve? Apparently someone liked the idea, huh?
We'll have to wait it out but for now, I'll hold on to my AE and keep Time Machine backing up to my old G5 tower.
@fletcher
The thing is that the Airport Extreme page on Apple's website never mentioned the mystical "subject to change" when advertising its use with Time Machine. In this respect the AEBS just does not do what it was advertised to do. However, the issue is not so much that the AEBS isn't supported by Time Machine but that its impossible, in my experience, to transfer large quantities of data to it over a wireless connection. Whenever I have attempted to copy files around 1GB in size the connection just craps-out after a while and I need to reboot the AEBS. At the current time it simply is not fit for purpose and I'm kicking myself for having bought one.