Upgrade abuse: Apple, TimeCapsule and the price of goodwill

About two weeks ago my wife and I swallowed hard and bought a 500 gigabyte Apple (AAPL) TimeCapsule. The primary reason we purchased this combination hard-drive and WiFi base station was because, no matter how hard we tried, we could not get iTunes to stream wirelessly from a third-party hard-drive.

We weren't the only ones who had trouble with this; even after three visits to the Apple store, offending gear in tow, the company's own geniuses were unable to figure out the problem. For my wife, a musician with an enormous music library, this widely-discussed issue was a deal breaker, and we had read that streaming music wirelessly off the TimeCapsule worked very well. We elected to buy the smaller version for $299.