Apple quietly extends first-gen Time Capsule warranty

Apple has tacitly extended the warranty period on Time Capsule hard drive-equipped wireless routers released between February and June 2008. The Time Capsule was launched in January of that year, but didn't ship until the following month. Punters were pleased with the machine's merger of 500GB or 1TB "server grade" - according …

[The Unexpected Bill]

Isn't that something?

I bought two of them for use in a small business environment. When they worked--which was, frankly, hit and miss on a good day--they were on the low side of "OK". But they never worked as smoothly and quickly as they should have.

One of the two is still going. The other hung it up one day and dropped off the network. It seemed to be semi-alive (after a hard reset, it was creating a wireless network with the default SSID and that was it) yet it would never boot up all the way. It lived two months past the warranty, so I phoned Apple to see what they'd do, hoping that a pro-rated exchange could be made. They were polite but insistent that nothing could be done, I'd just have to buy another one. Popping it apart revealed that the heat speader pads had leaked some kind of oil on the PCB and its component parts. From what I could see, the fallout looked to be corrosive.

Since neither of them worked all that well from the start, I went down another path:

http://greyghost.mooo.com/timecapsule-vs-freenas/ (no ads, spyware, malware or anything else--just the facts, folks) and haven't looked back. It gets the job done, without a hassle.

Frankly, when a 200MHz Pentium Pro operates more reliably and beats the pants off the Time Capsule in terms of performance, I think it safe to say that there is a problem. It only gets rebooted when the UPS tells it to do so after a long enough power outage.

[Piro]

I disagree, with the Pentium Pro part

One of the old Pentium Pro servers is most likely designed to last until the end of time. Apple's shit, never is.

[JaitcH]

Apple eye candy

Apple products aren't supposed to be functional, just to give the buyer a warm fuzzy feeling.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Bill

"In other words, [freenas] isn't something for someone who only knows where the power button is on their computer"

Doesn't that mean it's useless for the average Apple user (in fact Apple's whole target market)?

[The Unexpected Bill]

I'm not sure, but possibly...

I guess it depends a lot on what kind of computer user a person is. No matter what kind of computer hardware someone buys, you can't always convince them that investing a little time and trouble to understand and better utilize the extremely powerful piece of equipment they just parked on their desktop is a good idea. Those people have to take what they are given...if they bother at all.

[JaitcH]

Too ashamed to sue?

Obviously the deaths of this product presaged the defects in the Icrap series of telephones with batteries burning, cases melting culminating in their latest fiasco of bars and antennae that don't work. iCrap 4 still maintains the self-combustibility that is the heritage of the Apple communicators. Remember they had monitor problems, too?

Obviously Apple is too ashamed to sue TimeCapsule for abusing their logo, Apple has never made gravestones even though they manufactured the 'bodies'.

May they R.I.P.

[Ted Treen]

Oh well, it's inevitable...

...that instead of welcoming a responsible attitude & response, the diatribe of anti-Apple invective which nowadays appears par for the course on Reg forums will shortly follow.

[Henry Wertz 1]

"server grade?"

not likely... 1) i don't think they made any server grade 500 or 1TB disks yet back then, since server drives tend to be technololgically conservative. 2) for a single disk unit i wouldn't want a server drive -- they are pricey, and the one feature of disabling bad block handling is useful for raid arrays but not good for some unit with a disk or 2 in it.

[JEDIDIAH]

Legato Ultra-Light

If you are fixating on the drive size then you are kind of missing the whole point of "server grade" to begin with. No one locks "server grade" drives into un-maintainable enclosures. This is nice for consumer ease of use but it's by no means robust enough for anything serious.

"server grade" drives are expected to fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point...

No matter which drive is used you can't call it "server grade" if it's non-redundant, i.e no RAID.

Spinny drives are too unreliable to trust important data to just 1 of them, no sane server admin uses 1 drive... and anyone who cares about their backups buys a RAID NAS system, at least RAID 1.

IMHO companies which punt things such as time capsule and claim to protect your data with just 1 drive are flat out dishonest, what's the good of a time capsule style version history if the single drive it's stored on dies... OK you still have the current copy, but not much use if you then need those old versions is it...

Arghhhh the ease with which average consumers can be conned!

[Steve Medway]

Don't accept an ordinary TC replacement

Apple tried to fob me off with another identical TC to the one that died a few months back (note my TC was out of warranty). I was not a happy bunny.

After a call to Apple Customer Services (who where really nice and damn helpful) they replaced my 1Tb first gen unit with a brand spanking new dual band one with much better wired/wireless performance. The new one also secretly supports Jumbo packets whereas the old one didn't which makes a big difference on a Gigabit network :-)

The new model also has a green power hdd and gets nowhere near as hot as the old one.... So don't just accept a direct replacement for another unit with an inherent design fault.

[someone up north]

style over reliability?

so Apple products are all about style over reliability

[Adam Salisbury]

Yep

Only just noticed that?

[Dave 142]

no

Despite my Apple allegiance there is no way on Earth I would buy a Time Capsule because it's so expensive for what it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said sir!

Love my Mac machines, but for 500 sovs I can buy a 4.5TB NetGear ( with RAID-5 ) that supports TimeMachine backups, SMB and AFP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tombo

I have a 1TB 1st gen and it's been doing fine for a while. Good wireless, good backups, can't complain.

By server grade HD, I think they mean in mean lifetime hours like WD categorizes their drives (green, blue black). It would be nice if they were RAID 1, but it's still a good unit.