Home > Consumer Reviews > Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)

After hours of debate between the 500gb and the 1tb I decided on the 500 because of the server-grade Seagate Barricuda drive installed. Both offer additional storage options via the USB 2.0 port on the back, hooked up my 250gb portable and it worked like a charm.

I would have gone with the standard four external ports on the back instead of three, I like to go wired when possible and this causes me to use an external switch but a small price to pay for a great product.

Shipped with known bugs. Which make installation tedious, and use frustrating. Apparently the backup and sleep software are not well coordinated -- leading to system crashes during sleep. Apple's solution: turn off sleep. (Not a desirable solution in my opinion.)

5 hour waiting queues for support.

Serious design flaw: combining backups with network routing, slows down both; especially as the size of your network increases.
Maybe not so bad if you have a network of one computer, and you turn off the automatic backup feature ... but that defeats the purpose to a large extent. Perhaps backups and networking could use separate data buses and processors ...? If the tasks were distributed to processors not being used on the local network ... ?

The Apple Store website refuses to publish reviews that specifically mention product design flaws, or problems with shipping, or support. When serious problems are present, as a potential customer, I would like to be informed prior to purchase.

I have to agree with some of the 1 star reviews, particularly the one calling this a "brutal" product. I, too, have several Apple devices, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhone 3g, and 3 iPods. Like the others, it comes in very stylish packaging, and looks great sitting on a desk. But you don't buy equipment for the box, you buy it because it works well. The Time Capsule doesn't. Its main purpose, in addition to being a router with wireless 802.11n capability is to be a backup device for your computer(s). In this respect it fails miserably.

When getting a backup device, one usually wants something that works easily, reliably and seamlessly, so it is actually used and will be there in the event it is needed when a computer fails or loses data. This device does none of these things like it is supposed to.

Even when it is working, it seems to back up the same things over and over intil the disk is full. For some reason it doesn't seem to want to do incremental backups. It doesn't warn you when it is full like it's supposed to, unless I missed some setting in its too lacking interface.

Once it connects to a machine, it doesn't like it if you change something on the computer and wants you to eliminate all reference to the computer to do a different backup.

I was able to use the USB port to hook up a printer for anyone on the network to use, but was never able to get it to print from a Windows XP PC using Bonjour like it should.

So now I have a relatively expensive NAS and router that I would never have bought if I knew how poorly it worked. It also seems very warm to the touch, which leads me to believe that it is not very ecology friendly.

My recommendation is, if you need a good backup, buy a cheaper NAS and some decent software to do the job.

I did give it 2 stars since it will work, just not very well, but consider it rounded up from 1.5 stars.

I am not happy with this purchase.

disclaimer: This is one of the few items I have reviewed on Amazon that I did not actually purchase from Amazon.com (I bought it from Apple to get the education discount). Even on sale Amazon doesn't give you much of a discount on Apple products.

The biggest complaint I have about my Time Capsule is that I never can remember if the Time Machine is the Leopard software or the wireless router 802.11n router with built in hard drive. When I had an issue that required a call to the support desk both of us were getting confused. Since steve Jobs named Macs precusor Lisa after his daughter, perhaps they should have used some line from the movie Airport!. ("I speak jive" or "Do you like gladiator movies?" have possiblities)

Now I already had an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Gigabit) MB053LL/A which ran the wireless home network for my Mac Book Pro and iMac. I love the AirPort Extreme which as I have said in my review of it has unlocking software which allows almost all Intel-based Macs to run on 802.11n networks. thisis to say it runs very very fast. The Time Capsule has the same unlocking software as you might expect.

So why would I invest in what is essentially another AirPort Extreme when I have a perfectly good one? The answer has everything to do with Time Machine. For Time Machine to be properly utilized you need a backup external hard drive and for that you need an Ethernet, USB or firewire connection. Now this is not that big a deal with a desktop like the iMac. But I also have a laptop and wires are issues, major issues, in big powerful laptops like my Apple MacBook Pro MB076LL/A 17" Laptop (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Glossy Display, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD SuperDrive) which essentially function as portable desktops.

So what to do about the now surplus, but perfectly great AirPort Extreme? I took it to the office and plugged my Brother HL-2070N Network Monochrome Laser Printer (Black) into it creating a wireless office network with printing capabilities. Time Machine will not let you do backups to different external hard drives. for office backup, I could and occasionally do back up my laptop to my server. But since my Time Capsule effortlessly backs me up every hour at home (this amounts to at least three hours per day powered up) the office backup is hardly necessary.

Finally I got to use Time Machine (that's the software in case you got confused) when my wife who uses the iMac decided she did not like the newer version of Firefox. It is the simplest and best backup program I have ever encountered. I will not wish ever to have to do a full restore on either machine, but I feel much more confident about its outcome.

My experience with this product is based on using Windows XP operating system.

I bought this router because I needed an external hard drive and a new wireless router. Having set up several wireless networks in the past I was enticed by Apple's claim that setup was a breeze. In the past I had headaches and spent way more time than I wanted to getting things to work correctly.

Unfortunately this time was no different. When I tried calling Apple they did not have support open. When I tried using the online system it told me my product was out of warranty even though I had just received it that day.

I would recommend that any Windows user go with a less expensive router and get an external hard drive separately as the price for this product did not justify the performance. The only good thing about this product is that the backup folder is easy to use once it is setup.