I'm all in the Apple ecosystem, but I'm starting to feel pushed out. First the Mac Pro, then Displays, now this? Is Time Capsule next? My airport extreme is the most reliable home router I have ever owned.
That's true. Phil Schiller said the following in "The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs" [1]:
>> Schiller, in fact, has a grand philosophical theory of the Apple product line that puts all products on a continuum. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.
>> “They are all computers,” he says. “Each one is offering computers something unique and each is made with a simple form that is pretty eternal. The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”
[1]: https://backchannel.com/exclusive-why-apple-is-still-sweatin...
Its bizarre, they have an app you can use on the smaller devices but actively limit the functionality it can have forcing me to use my macbook instead. I wish they would just allow their products to be as useful as they should be.
But if you're in the Apple ecosystem anyway, I think it's really convenient to take complete disk images for a full system restore. I think it's cool to use a 3-2-1 backup chain with a backup system image.
Granted, this is coming from someone who uses Tarsnap, Arq and Crashplan; but I've used Apple time capsules and I really admire their usability. In a restore scenario I don't have to choose particular files or folders, I just have to choose a date and the entire system is back. This is not without its downsides (no granularity in restore), but it's super convenient if it's what you need.
If I were in a decision making position, I'd get rid of the Apple routers like they are doing and double down on time capsules by providing an integrated offsite solution, perhaps marketed with end to end encryption as a nod to privacy advocates.
In my experience, it's always been easy to set up. Actually using the Time Capsule, I've had one Time Capsule die, and one instance where I used a backup over 8 years. Retrieving the data from the backup was easy, without requiring a reference to a manual, IIRC.
Not necessarily a good thing when I'm tethering, but neat other times :P