Apple

The wireless backup feature that disappeared from Apple's promotional copy for its Leopard operating system has snuck in through the back door.

Macworld did a little poking around with the recently released Mac OS X software update for "Time Machine and Airport" and realized that Time Machine now recognizes a generic USB hard drive plugged into an Airport Extreme base station, allowing Airport Extreme users to wirelessly back up their notebooks with Leopard's Time Machine. You need to mount the external hard drive using Finder to make sure Time Machine can see it, according to Macworld.

Time Machine will now work wirelessly with MacBooks after a software update.

(Credit: Apple)

Apple had promoted this aspect of Time Machine--wireless backups via Airport Extreme and a USB hard drive--in its advertising for Leopard, the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X released in October. But at the last minute, that capability was pulled from Apple's ads, and Leopard early adopters found they were unable to use Time Machine with a notebook unless they plugged a USB hard drive directly into the notebook, or if they set up a complicated storage-area network. It was never clear what led to the disappearance of that feature, but perhaps the code just simply wasn't ready for prime time.

In January, Apple announced Time Capsule, a combination USB hard drive/wireless base station that allowed for wireless backups. But at $299 or $499, depending on the storage capacity, it's a pricey option for people who already own Airport Extreme and USB hard drives.

Time Capsule is a pretty easy way of getting the wireless backups up and running if you don't already have a wireless access point or USB hard drive. But if you bought Time Capsule to replace your Airport Extreme access points and USB hard drives, well, um, turns out you didn't need to do that.

Apple has begun shipping Time Capsule, its latest external hard drive that is pretty much the only game in town if you want to do wireless Time Machine backups from your notebook.

Time Capsule was first introduced at Macworld. It's an 802.11n Wi-Fi base station with either a 500GB or 1TB hard drive that allows you to back up files to the drive or share files across a network without having to connect a cable. It will set you back either $299 or $499, depending on the storage size chosen.

Time Capsule is now available for either $299 or $499, depending on capacity.

(Credit: Apple)

It's a solid product in its own right (although stay tuned for CNET's review), but Time Machine Capsule is actually a workaround for a feature in Mac OS X Leopard that disappeared just before Apple was getting ready to ship the new operating system. In the runup to Leopard's debut, Apple advertised wireless backup features as part of Time Machine, the intuitive backup and recovery program that was included with Mac OS X 10.5.

But that language was pulled from the ad copy just days prior to Leopard's debut, and its disappearance has never been officially explained, as far as I can tell. As a result, there was no way to use Time Machine on a MacBook or MacBook Pro and an external hard drive without physically connecting the notebook, which is kind of a pain. You can set up wireless backups if you're running a Leopard server in your home, or if you set up a Xsan storage-area network, but those aren't really practical options for most of us.

It seems likely that the external hard drive itself needs some sort of extra intelligence to process the Time Machine handoffs over a wireless connection, requiring Apple to design Time Capsule with that updated firmware or software. Still, it would be a shame if Apple is unable or unwilling to add that capability into Leopard via a future software update, forcing anyone who wants to do wireless backups to buy Apple's hard drive.

Macworld is a little like the Super Bowl: one big day where everything gets laid out on the table.

So, let's break down Macworld 2008, Super Bowl style. Instead of offense, defense, and special teams, however, I'll take each of the big four themes that Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented, and share my thoughts.

MacBook Air -- I'm not crazy about the name, but this is a nice-looking laptop. Ultraportable laptops are prestige products for both the vendor and the customer; Apple gets to show off what it's capable of designing, while the customer gets to show off his or her taste and style.

These $1,799 laptops are not for the masses. Most people will have to make too many compromises with the MacBook Air, from the lack of an optical drive, Firewire, and an Ethernet jack to the battery, which like those in the iPhone and iPod can't be replaced by the user.

What's in the envelope? The super-slim MacBook Air.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

But this is a nice addition to Apple's lineup of notebooks. It definitely will appeal to a group of people who aren't worried about making those trade-offs, and it gives Apple another design accomplishment to crow about.

Especially since the rest of the PC industry probably won't be able to duplicate Apple's thin approach without taking advantage of Intel's new packaging technology for its Core 2 Duo chip. Intel will probably offer that packaging technique to the rest of the PC industry, but as Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 pointed out, Dell and Hewlett-Packard probably didn't know about that breakthrough until this morning. That would put them about six months behind Apple.

iPhone/iPod touch software upgrades: Apple introduced several new helpful features for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, such as the ability to put an icon for a specific Web page on the home screen, and the ability to send a text message to more than one person. I think the enhanced Maps application, however, will prove the most compelling.

Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod and iPhone marketing at Apple, demonstrated the Maps application for me after the keynote. There's a little button on the lower left corner of the Maps application that brings up an icon resembling the cross-hairs from a gun's sight. Apple teamed up with Skyhook Wireless to allow the iPhone or the iPod Touch to triangulate its position to a certain degree of accuracy simply by hitting that button. The smaller the cross-hairs, the more precise the fix on your location. Then you can just use Maps to get directions to your destination from your current location, even if you don't know exactly where you are.

The first grumble of the day from the Macworld crowd came when Jobs announced that similar software upgrades would cost iPod Touch users $19.99. Granted, iPod Touch users did get five new features already found on the iPhone--Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes--in addition to the location-finding technology and customized Web bookmarks on the home screen, which Apple calls Web Clips.

I think our good friend The Macalope is onto something, however, when iAntlers points out that Apple didn't include the iPod Touch along with the other products using subscription-based accounting, namely the iPhone and Apple TV. After the whole $2 Wi-Fi debacle, Apple made sure to announce up front that the company would record revenue from iPhone and Apple TV over a period of 24 months, which would allow it to deliver free upgrades to the product over that period of time. I e-mailed an Apple representative asking whether the iPod Touch is getting the subscription treatment, but I haven't heard back.

Time capsule: This was the first thing Jobs announced, and I have to say, I was underwhelmed. Time Capsule is a combination wireless access point/external hard drive that gets around a common complaint regarding Time Machine, the otherwise noteworthy automatic backup feature that Apple included with Leopard. Time Machine requires that your Mac be physically connected to an external hard drive in order to back up your files each night, and that's not the most convenient way to use a laptop.

If you don't have an access point, and you don't have an external hard drive, then Time Capsule might make a lot of sense at either $299 for 500GBs of storage or 1TB for $499. But the answer to the wireless Time Machine question--for those of us who already have wireless routers and external hard drives--is to have us shell out at least 300 more bucks for a piece of hardware that replaces the perfectly good hardware we already have? Sorry, I don't quite understand that one.

iTunes movie rentals/Apple TV: The biggest announcement of the day, in my opinion, even if some of the luster was lost as news leaked out over the past two weeks. My colleague Greg Sandoval, who covers the entertainment industry much more closely than I, weighed in with his thoughts on industry impact of the decision, but I'll take a moment to consider the impact on Apple TV.

With more features and a cheaper price, Apple TV is suddenly much more compelling.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

This instantly makes Apple TV more credible. Apple can finally stand behind its message that Apple TV can replace your DVD player. As it stood before, you could only get movies on Apple TV if you were willing to buy them. So, you'd still need your DVD player for those movies you thought you might like but weren't totally sure justified a purchase, which is just about all of them these days.

I'd still like to see an Apple TV with a browser (yeah, yeah, I know you can hack it--for now) so I can access all the other kinds of video available on the Internet, not to mention things like weather, maps, and stock reports that would be nice to have on a television. Of course, Apple wants you to buy movies from iTunes rather than getting your entertainment for free. But the company also didn't want to just dump a bunch of features into Apple TV just for the sake of doing so, Joswiak said.

"We hate to make these things into computers; we want to make them into things that people use in their lives," Joswiak said after the keynote. Apple TV is infinitely more useful with movie rentals, although I agree with Daring Fireball's John Gruber, The New York Times' David Pogue, and countless others: 24 hours is way too short a window to finish a movie that I already started. If you start a movie at night after work, and don't finish it because something came up, you better not have plans for tomorrow night if you want to finish that movie. That's not exactly on-demand content.

While Macworld 2008 wasn't exactly a sensation (the "one more thing" was Randy Newman, for crying out loud), Apple certainly didn't made any major missteps Tuesday that would put a dent in its momentum heading into the new year. The Mac and iPod businesses appear to have had solid holiday seasons, and Jobs announced that Apple sold 2.6 million iPhones from the end of September until the end of December, for a total of 4 million since iPhone Day in June.

There's still plenty of things to keep watching for, including a MacBook and/or MacBook Pro redesign and third-party applications for the iPhone, to name two at the top of my list. I think the iTunes Rental Store bears the most watching of Tuesday's announcements because of its potential impact both on Apple's iTunes Store business and the industry at large, and we'll be sure to keep track.