What's killing Apple's Time Capsules after 18 months?

What's killing Apple's Time Capsules after 18 months?

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Something is killing a number of Apple's Time Capsule - its wireless, networked, remote storage device launched with great fanfare in January 2008 by Steve Jobs - prematurely.

Suspicions have fallen on the internal design of the system: specifically, that the drives simply overheat, killing the electronics. And once your hard drive has died, you haven't got much hope of resuscitating it. There's no external power supply: the power supply unit, rectifier, hard drive, and wireless are all in the same tight box.

The Time Capsule Memorial site, set up only on 12 October by the "annoyed" Dutch ex-Time Capsule user Pim van Bochoven, has already got more than 750 registrations from people all over the world whose machines have died after as little as 17 days' use. The longest-lived on the site is 643 days - though that's not much more than 21 months. The average for those submitted is stubbornly around the 540-day mark.

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He says he created it because "I was annoyed by Apple refusing to acknowledge that there's a problem. When my TC died, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who had the same experience in such a small timeframe (it started around end of August). Instead of (just) complaining on discussion boards that Apple never reads, I figured we'd have a better chance of getting Apple to take notice when we are able to provide a better overview of the scale of this 'thing'. And of course, getting enough attention in doing so, not only towards Apple, but also to get as much people who are affected by the massive failure aware of the project."

Apple however has declined to replace the systems, saying that they're out of its one-year warranty. (However one of the UK users had it fail after just 31 days, and two others had failures in less than 365 days: they should have cases under the Sale of Goods act.)

I asked an Apple representative to comment on this and whether Apple would take any action or could explain why it was happening. Apple has not responded.

Of course it is not possible to say what proportion of Time Capsules are failing, as Apple has not released sales figures; but nor will everyone whose device has failed have registered it on van Bochoven's site.

However any failure is a long way from the claims made at its launch: ""With Time Capsule and Time Machine, all your irreplaceable photos, movies and documents are automatically protected and incredibly easy to retrieve if they are ever lost." Apparently Steve Jobs told that to an Apple PR person. He hasn't yet told it to anyone whose Time Capsule has died peacefully in its sleep during the night - leaving them screaming in horror.

What's the cause of the failures? "Overheated electronics," says van Bochoven. "Apparently the power supply's capacitors can't take heat for such a long period of time. Like so many others, I noticed that the TC gets really hot, but I hadn't expected this to become fatal in just 18 months time."

He thinks that Apple should recall them all: "It's tough, but the [Time Capsule] thermal design is really a big mistake. The problem of course is the data stored on the harddisk, which cannot be taken out by an average user."

There is an option to fix it by creating an external power supply - Ray Haverfield has a site explaining how to do it. But you might find that unattractive.

For those with long memories, this whole overheating affair will bring back memories of the problems with the early versions of Apple's first wireless device, the Apple Airport Base Station. Those, too, turned out to be prone to overheating. That was back in 2001.

In fact Apple sometimes seems like it's prone to problems with thermal cycling: remember the logic board on the iBook G4?

Whether this will now lead to some action by Apple is hard to tell. It may require a class action in the US - but we'd still say that people in the UK whose Time Capsule fails within a year of purchase have a very good case for replacement (though we don't know if you'll be able to keep the disk with the data); if it fails within two years you might be able to. On that topic, you'd need to refer to our Capital Letters consumer section...