Worth Reading?
+5 [5 votes]
Loading ...This think got its name partly from its intended use, you see currently you have to have a wired, direct-connected hard drive in order to use Time Machine, but with this thing, you can backup wirelessly, or over a network, if you wanted to, and you can backup directly to this drive instead of some other external drive. If this thing works with PC’s as well as Macs, and if it works as just plain old NAS as well as backup storage, than this will by far be my favorite release that was announced today. It’s also the only announcement where the product isn’t available now, in fact, it won’t be available until February.
It is quite literally an AirPort Extreme with all the wired and wireless connections built in, then just adds in a 500GB or 1TB HDD that’s apparently server grade. I just finished reading the fine print and it works with Window’s computers, both XP and Vista, and Macs (obviously), but it will work with both as a run of the mill NAS as well, not just a backup drive.
So, this is officially my favorite announcement today, and I want one now. But in order to get one I’ll have to fork out a minimum of $299 for the 500GB or $499 for the 1TB, comparatively to other NAS drives, that’s damn good pricing considering it also has both a wired and wireless router/AP/switch built in.
Yeah, it’s great…expect I just bought an Airport Extreme a few months ago, and I already have an external drive I’ve been Time Machine-ing to… I can’t believe that in order to backup wirelessly, I have to buy the exact same components again from Apple! Not cool at all. Apple should turn on this ability for current Extreme owners…I doubt that there is any technical reason that they can’t do this.