Coffee + tech + travel = happy
APC staff
12 posts
Posted: 22/03/2008 2:03 AM
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I've been playing with Time Capsule on and off over the past few days, and it's a damned curious piece of work. It reminds me in some ways of the MacBook Air, the iPod, the MacBook and other Apple hardware -- there's just so much that I really like about it, yet also quite a few flaws which could, I think, be easily be fixed for Time Capsule 2.0.
(Apple has this odd duality about so much of its products, yes? I love my iPod but just wish Apple would have added an FM radio -- a component that would cost bugger all! I love my MacBook but wish it had an SD/CF memory card slot. I love so much about the MacBook Air but wish Jobs had made it the world's best thin notebook rather than the world's thinnest notebook so that we could have had an Ethernet port, one extra USB port etc).
Five things I really like about Time Capsule
* The combo of WiFi, network ports (and Gigabit at that, not just 10/100), a USB printer port plus of course a hard drive in one small sweet box. I mean, that's a killer combo. It's not as if Apple invented some new technology in order to do this, they just put the pieces together in a way that almost no other vendor has.
* And they put those pieces in a very nice package. This stuff counts, at least in my book. That small slim square slab is such a delightful design. Plus little touches like just ONE light on the front (glows or strobes amber or green, depending on status), with all the ports on the back. And no power brick: the PSU is in the chassis, so there's just one thin cable for the AC powerpoint. Very consumer-ish.
* It just works. Yes, that's almost par for the course for Apple gear, but I've come from almost two decades in the Windows world where it sorta just worked most of the time well a lot of the time well okay some of the time and it really helped if you knew what you were doing and could call a mate if things got hairy. But seriously, I didn't need to fiddle with IP addresses or Web-based control panels. The whole experience was pretty smooth.
* 802.11n -- and that's proper dual-band 11n with 5GHz, one of the very few wireless routers to do so. As mentioned in a different post, I've set it up to run locked onto 5Ghz for my MacBook and other 5GHz clients while my modem+router stays on 11g 2.4GHz for compatibility with anything that can handle only 11b or 11g.
* Wireless printing via the USB port. A small thing, you may think, but it just rounds out the whole experience for the device's intended usage. Again, something I wish more vendors would put in their home networking gear.
But at the same time, there are also...
Five Time Capsule traits I'm not quite so keen on
I'm not going to get too techie here -- I mean, some folks would like it to support a user-replaceable hard drive, or two drives with RAID, but that's not applicable to the target audience and/or the drive's primary function as a backup and network share drive. I'm keeping the average home user more in mind here.
* No per-user folders. You can set permissions for multiple users: read only or read/write, for instance. But that applies across the entire drive. As a shared drive I'd like to have seen TC support multiple folders that can be public or private on a per-user basis (like Windows Home Server does). This should be standard on any form of network drive for the home. But it's an easy fix for Time Capsule 2.0 -- hell, it's an easy fix with a future software update.
* The unit runs toasty warm to hot. No doubt this is due to the PSU being built into the chassis. And you may say 'Oh, but after the first backup the hourly Time Machine backup is very brief, this thing isn't running all the time'. And that's true: it quickly drops into standby mode. Yet even then it stays so very warm. I'd not want to stick this thing in a cupboard without any ventilation. (Happily, it looks so good that you don't need to hide it.)
* Apple sorta fibbed about the 'server-grade hard drive'. From the MacWorld keynote when His Jobsness introduced Time Capsule to the press releases and marketing gumpf, Apple says that Time Capsule contains a 'server-grade hard drive'. But as several online pull-aparts revealed, the TC uses a Hitachi Deskstar drive, which is of course a desktop drive. Apple has some leeway here. First is that their XServe uses the same Deskstar drive, so it can accurately be called a 'server-grade' drive because it's in their XServe. Which some may feel says more about XServe than anything else. More 'honourable' is that Apple has since clarified that by 'server-grade' they refer to mean time between failure, and say the Deskstar model they've chosen has a higher MTBF than the average consumer drive. I just think they blurred the lines a little there, and it left a slightly sour taste in my mouth. Mind you, I'd still buy a Time Capsule...
* But I'd be tempted to buy it next time I'm in the US because of the price disparity between AU and US pricing. The 500GB TC costs US$300, while the 1TB costs US$500. Of course, US state sales tax would bump this up a little depending on which state you bought them. Let's say California, which has a high state tax of 7.25%, lifting those prices to US$321 and US$536. That's equivalent to A$355 and A$594. The GST difference bumps those up a bit more, but there's still a bit of a way to go towards Apple's local RRP of $430 and $700, and yet our dollar's been quite strong against the US since December 2007, a month before the TC was even launched and almost three months prior to local release. Yes, I'm sure there are a variety of reasons for such differentials, but those of us who travel can make some savings in this area, and I'd rather pocket an $80-$100 saving by buying the TC next time I'm in San Francisco.
* Oh, and I know this last one seems a real stretch, but I wish it came in black. Yes, white seems to be the Apple colour, and it's hard to go wrong with white, but I'd suggest that black blends just as well with most modern decors (except for those minimalistic and unrealistic Vogue-style spreads that no-one ever seems to actually live in!). But maybe I'm reaching here -- maybe there is a fifth flaw of greater magnitude. If you've got a nomination for the fifth slot, post it here!
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