leopard’s time machine and wireless updates

i upgraded to leopard and have never really been able to make use of time machine since i have my external hard-drive connected to my airport extreme base-station. it hasn’t been a big deal since i am using some other backup software but one thing that kind of bugs me is the new time-capsule product. one thing i wonder is if the upcoming leopard update will make it possible to use time machine also with airport extreme + an attached hard drive or if it will only work with the time capsule. i don’t know what the difference is, but would like to know. or is this  just one of these apple ways to punish its customers?

the real news from macworld was the studio lineup for itunes rentals

while the macbook air, the iphone software update, and also the new itunes movie rental service get a lot of press, the one big surprise for me was the lineup of movie studios apple was able to attract to the new service. this even after failing more or less at selling movies via itunes. this means that studios are either

• desperate to sell movies online and are trying everything since nothing really works so far
• don’t really mind that apple tv has been a failure so far
• and/or are seeing something in apple tv that i don’t see

i don’t  think the last two bullets are the reason, i think it is the first point … studios are desperate. with broadband becoming the norm in internet connection, the studios don’t want to end up like the music industry and they are just giving anything that provides protected movie distribution a try. and since with rentals users are not locked in to a platform as they are more or less on the music side (since you loose all your itunes purchased music if you switch from itunes to one of the other non apple services) the studios are in a much better position here (plus they don’t have a real napster yet).

new apple tv misses again

apple introduced a second version, take two, of its apple tv box. while it is certainly a big improvement over the initial version i doubt that this version will be more successful than the first version. certainly the price drop makes it more attractive (and i might even buy one), but i think that the addition of a dvd player would have made apple tv a clear winner.

in my view apple tv is made for those of us who are not tv fanatics, have no cable, but love to watch movies from time to time, or some tv shows. to me the apple tv audience has a tv, but either only a basic cable or no cable subscription at all. and while the new movie rental service via itunes looks good, netflix might still keep many of these users as customers. so adding a DVD player to the little box would probably have been quite easy and increased the audience dramatically. until then i guess the mac mini seems to be the better set top box for the non-cable users.