Did Apple Cripple Time Machine...?

[Mr Kleen]

I saw this on WIRED and wanted to get the local Apple fanboy perspective. this sure sounds like something M$ would do...

Did Apple Cripple Time Machine To Sell More Time Capsules?

Apple's New Time Capsule is a great idea. A combined wireless router and hard drive built to work with OS X Leopard's Time Machine for continuous, over-the-air backups. And it's pretty cheap, too.

But given that you can plug any USB hard drive into an existing Airport base station, shouldn't Time Machine work with third party hardware, too? Well, it did. Apple advertised this as a feature of Time Machine right up until Leopard was released. It was presents in the developer seeds of OS X 10.5, but pulled from the shipping version.

Speculation says that maybe Apple dropped the feature in order to sell more of its own boxes, deliberately blocking home made setups. If so, that's just sneaky. Then again, the next software update could bring a fix. Maybe Apple just wanted to be the first.

[complacent]

You can still enable it... You just need to rewrite a single pref. big, solid, meh. It's the windows equivalent of changing a registry entry from a 0 to a 1.

They were still testing it when they were developing leopard. Name a software company alive that hasn't removed features at release time or made them disabled by default.

Also, the hard drive in the capsule is higher grade than the usb external mybook someone just picked up at best buy. Could you imagine the support involved with a regular usb drive? Those things fail left and right. If you're relying on magnetic media for backups, you ought to at least make sure the drive is built to last.

Will they sell more time capsules because of it? Probably so.

Are the people who might be up in arms about it too stupid to make any computer run well? Probably so.

IMHO, Macs are a lot like Project Mayhem - You determine your own level of involvement.

Wanna be a "white gadget-toting hipster"? Just pay a lot of money for a mac and never learn about it... It happens all the time. And in all honesty, it usually works well.

Wanna schedule your own cron jobs? Compile stuff from pgksrc? (NetBSD, btw. And yes, there's an official Apple port of the entire pkgsrc repository)
change your firewall? write your own Samba config? Run a tail -50 on your desktop? Compile from teh source? Have an itching desire to run some obscure window manager over X? Just pay a lot of money for a mac and actually learn how it works.

Like I said, meh.

I like both Apple's hardware and software. But I'm not dumb enough to suck on every single pearl that Steve throws to the crowd. Just my .02USD. Caveat emptor baby, caveat emptor...

[scheherazade]

I personally don't like how centrally controlled apple is.

All hardware specific for that system has to be licensed and permitted by apple.
Their ddks, interface diagrams, all of it is secretive. You have to pay them to make something compatible with them, and they have to like you enough to let you do it.

I won't even get into how many people complain about MS after being too non-knowledgeable to properly maintain their installations.

-scheherazade

[complacent]

Here's an update: Apple officially allows third party drives to be used ala Time Capsule.

linky

And I still say meh.

[schvin]

IMHO, Macs are a lot like Project Mayhem - You determine your own level of involvement.

qfmft

[avriette]

Speculation says that maybe Apple dropped the feature in order to sell more of its own boxes, deliberately blocking home made setups. If so, that's just sneaky. Then again, the next software update could bring a fix. Maybe Apple just wanted to be the first.

For what it's worth, Apple's perspective on this is that they remove compatibility with third-party hardware to reduce the number of individual pieces of hardware they support, and to reduce quality assurance problems. They figure if it's not Apple, it's probably going to have issues, and thus removing that choice from your computing environment makes your machine more stable.

I don't necessarily believe it's the right way to frame things, or even the right choice, but I've always had better luck with my Macs using Apple's hardware and software (with the exception of the PowerComputing machines back in the 90s) than with third party products installed. This includes opensource applications. I just learned how to use the Apple stuff the way Apple intended, rather than trying to make my own style of work fit theirs.