As this is not a review of Time Machine, I will not get into the particulars. The differences are not obvious until you get ready to pay for your purchase. Time Capsule includes such a drive inside the Airport router. If you do not have an external drive, you will not be using Time Machine. To use it, you have to explicitly activate it, and point it to an external drive earmarked for backup. The software is called Time Machine, and is baked into the OS. For many years, every Mac has included software to facilitate seamless backups. The Time Capsule is the Airport Extreme with the addition of a hard drive inside for automatic, wireless backups. If the Airport Extreme is all that and a bag of Doritos, the Time Capsule is all that including the salsa. So far, I have been describing the router is is just the new Airport Extreme. Furthermore, one of those products has two different models that are also exactly alike save for one aspect. If you decide that you are going to go to the nearest Apple Store to pick up a base station, you should know that there are two distinct products that look exactly alike. How many people are in your family? How many wifi capable devices does that represent? If you have a number of modern devices, it may be time for you to upgrade to a modern router. The number of devices on your network have an effect on the signal strength of any particular device. In my house, there are a total of eight devices vying for network resources at any given time. Even my no-good network printer likes the new base station. My TV is also much faster accessing Netflix and movie trailers. Nothing has changed except the base station. With the new base station, I have signal out to the edge of my yard. The signal is almost non-existent on my porch. If during my news gathering I happen to encounter a video I want to watch, I typically have to bookmark it for later when I am in another part of the house. The signal has been rather weak in that spot. My iPhone is the first thing I reach for in the morning. I live in an old house with a lot of wireless interference. ![]() Simply put, it does a much better job of collecting and distributing the signal to more devices in more places. In the same way that the iPad is a CPU with a giant battery attached, the Airport base station is a networking chip with a giant antenna attached. There is more going on with this product than what the alphabet soup suggests. The raw numbers show this product outperforming its predecessor by a noticeable margin. I believe this might be a case where Apple grossly undersold the product. It was only desperation that forced me to give it a try. I refused to buy the product when it first came out for that very reason. If you are anything like me, you might be wondering why you should bother to care about a product more advanced than your current needs. Chances are you don't have an item that takes full advantage of the technology in this router. Suffice it to say that this new Airport base station has got all the right acronyms for yesterday, today, and many tomorrows to come. I have a genuine neck-beard, and I find most of it above my pay grade. All of it matters, and little of it is easy to understand. There are more obscure acronyms in network technology than in a bowl of alphabet soup. I am ill-equipped to expound upon the details. Networking is one of the most technical aspects of computing. Obviously this is an oversimplification of the truth. Getting that internet connection to your laptop, tablet, or phone without wires is the job of the wifi router.Ĭheap routers do the job poorly. Almost everyone reading this has some type of broadband internet coming into their house, whether provided by cable or DSL. Since that is not the case, we have to provide that necessity for ourselves. Frankly, modern homes should have wifi built in as a part of the standard, like plumbing or electricity. (Yes, that is an awful expression I am going to have to stop using.) It is two products in one. ![]() ![]() The Airport Time Capsule is Apple's way of killing two birds with one stone. I might just have a solution for you: Base station If this is happening to you, don't worry. You might also suffer signal degradation when the microwave oven is on. The main symptom is that when you go to a certain part of your home, your iPhone, iPad, or Mac has a hard time holding a connection to the internet, or displaying web pages, or streaming music and podcasts. It's just that you might be suffering from a very common problem: high bandwidth, weak signal. How's the wifi at your house? I don't mean to just dive in with a personal question.
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