Airport Disk Users Upset Over the Timing of "Time Capsule"

At Macworld this year, Steve Jobs made sure to point out Time Machine's shortcomings for notebook users: having to plug and unplug the backup drive. And that, as he said, was the reason for Time Capsule.

Of course, there was already supposed to be a solution for this, right from the launch of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Time Machine was supposed to support the AirPort Extreme and its AirPort Disk feature. The Airport Disk is really just a USB port on the router that will allow you to share an external USB drive with the rest of the network.

Originally Apple said Time Machine would work with the Airport Disk, but one the day Leopard launched, they posted this tech note that said the Airport Disk was not supported. And it still isn't. You can imagine anyone who purchased the Airport Extreme with that feature in mind feeling the Time Capsule was like rubbing salt in their wounds.

The problems in using "just any old" NAS with Time Machine is outlined in this Apple support forum post, which is a response to a question about Time Capsule.

Apple does not currently support Time Machine backups to any NAS device other than Time Capsule, and to many people's dismay Time Machine backups don't reliably work to Apple's currently shipping attempt at a NAS server (ie the Airport Extreme N base station with external USB hard drive).

Dismay is an understatement. Another popular thread in the support forums is titled "After Time Capsule, what is my AirPort Extreme good for?" That thread was posted right after Steve Jobs' keynote which announced Time Capsule, BTW.

The responses to the question include this one, which says:

I was one of the suckers to buy an AE and 500GB hard drive when Apple posted that Leopard would be the answer to the back-up problem. All you needed was a AE and USB drive and Time Machine would do the rest. I believed them and look where that got me.

Then there's this one, that says:

So here enters timecapsule. A base station with an internal drive. So like the folks who bought the first wave of Iphones, I feel like I been had. Now I need to go out an buy timecapsules, just to get the feature that Apple initally said extreme would support.

Finally there's this one, that says:

I'm disappointed just like everyone else who spent "x" amount of dollars on AEBS and a massive hard drive. Time Capsule sounds like a great product, I'm just hoping Apple releases an update so we can use the hardware we already spent our money on.

That's the main point of most of the support forum posts: Apple, we spent money based on a promise. Fulfill the promise so it's not just a useless brick.

I'm wondering if Apple has run into the type of issue Microsoft does with Windows. In general, Apple controls most of the hardware that runs their OSes. In this case, you can hook any old USB external drive to the Airport Extreme, as opposed to Time Capsule, which is Apple hardware.

Could that be the issue? At this point, who knows? That same thread accuses Apple of deleting support forum posts, however. I'm sure if they really could go back in time, some users might choose to forego buying an Airport Extreme.

At any rate, getting Time Machine to work with any NAS, regardless of Time Capsule, would be the ideal. Hopefully there will be more to come.