Announced during Macworld Conference & Expo in January, Apple confirmed on Thursday the company began shipping its hardware backup tool, Time Capsule. Notifications of the shipments began reaching customers that pre-ordered the device early this morning.
Time Capsule is the hardware companion to Time Machine, Apple’s automatic backup tool that was introduced as part of Mac OS X Leopard. Time Capsule combines an 802.11n network access point and a hard disk drive — in fact, the device is a full AirPort Extreme base station.
Time Capsule features dual-band antennas for 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequencies. It has one USB 2.0, one Gigabit Ethernet, and three Gigabit LAN ports. The device also has a built-in power supply and can connect to print wirelessly from a USB printer, according to Apple. In addition, Time Machine offers Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA-2), 128-bit WEP encryption and a built-in NAT firewall that support NAT-PMP for Leopard’s Back to My Mac feature.
Time Capsule ships in two capacities: a 500GB model for $299, and a 1TB version for $499.