Apple has it wrong - Time Capsule

Apple has had a pretty good track record of introducing innovative and well designed products at their annual MacWorld Expo over the past 4 to 5 years. However, this year's MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs has gotten it all wrong. Lets follow the four step keynote speech that was given, shall we?

Part One: Time Capsule

The first new product introduced by Apple at MacWorld 2008 is the Time Capsule, a wireless backup solution that works exclusively with Leopard's Time Machine. I do admit that on the surface, the concept of the Time Capsule is nice. It matches especially well with Apple's strategy of predominant selling mobile laptops and sub-notebooks.

However, the Time Capsule is nothing more than Apple's AirPort Extreme Base Station with an internal 500GB hard drive plugged-in. I did a quick check at the online Singapore Apple Store today. The Time Capsule has an estimated cost of S$788, presumably for the 500GB model. On the other hand, the AirPort Extreme Base Station is selling for S$288. That is a 500 dollar difference, or exactly $1 per Gigabyte.

In contrast, you can get a 500 Gigabyte hard disk at Sim Lim Square today for no more than S$200. That is 40 cents per Gigabyte. As a backup solution, it would be much cheaper to simply buy an AirPort Extreme Base Station and a hard drive than to buy the Time Capsule. Naturally, Apple has foreseen this and surprise, surprise, the current AirPort Extreme firmware does not work with Time Machine.

Based on Apple's previous explanation, the only change required to turn the AirPort Extreme into a Time Capsule should be as simple as updating the firmware of the AirPort Extreme Base Station with some modified software. And being a Computer Scientist, I know it can be a moderately simple modification that should not involve more than modifying a hundred lines of code. It should be something that can be completely solved, debugged, tested and quality assured in a few engineering man days.

As it currently stands, even when I factor in the convenience of not having to physically connect up a server grade hard drive, I find it very difficult to accept Time Capsule's pricing. I find it even more difficult to comprehend why Apple did not upgrade AirPort Extreme Base Station as a cheaper solution.