Features and Design

The Time Capsule is essentially Apple’s Airport Extreme Base Station router with a 1 terabyte hard drive inside, making what is essentially a NAS-ready router. The router portion of the Time Capsule sports four Gigabit Ethernet ports (10/100/1000), the ability to broadcast wireless A, B, G and N speeds. It’s available with either a 500GB or 1TB hard drive.

One of the biggest features of Time Capsule is that it works in tandem with the new Time Machine feature found in the latest version of OS X, Leopard. The Time Machine software automatically backs up the entire hard drive of a Mac, then periodically makes backups of whatever has changed since the last backup, allowing the user to go back in time to recover old files. The Time Machine feature is only available in Leopoard, however, so it does not work on PCs.

The router features a built-in firewall, and in addition to its four Ethernet ports also has a USB port for its built-in print server, which allows a USB printer to be shared out to the network from the Time Capsule.

The Apple Time Capsule is compatible with Windows XP SP2, Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4 or later and comes with a one-year warranty, software CD and power cable.

The Time Capsure features a single light that’s on the front that’s either orange (bad), green (good), or blue (ready for wireless client).

The back of the Apple Time Capsule