14 DAY TRIAL // Apple may have heavily advertised the 300 plus new features in Leopard, but it has been rather silent about the promised features that were dropped out of the final version. Of these, users are most upset about the lack of airport support for Time Machine.
Time Machine is one of the new features that most of Leopard buyers intended to use, and across the development cycle, Apple advertised various features for it. The ability to use the software with airport disk was one of these, but it never made it into the final product available today. Apple originally marketed the feature as ?Effortless meets wireless,? and the description on the company?s site read: "With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine."
All references to this functionality were removed from Apple?s site before the launch, and the description now states: "You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices."
Companies change the features lists more often than not before the final release, but the reason that people are so angry with Apple over this is the fact that this feature required special hardware, which they already bought to use for this exact feature. While the feature was present in the earlier pre-release versions of Leopard that developers received, Apple has for some reason decided to drop it for the time being. Now people who have purchased AirPort Extreme in order to make use of them with Time Machine are hoping that Apple will eventually implement the feature in a future update to the operating system.