Connecting your PC to an Apple Time Capsule

Published: 23rd of March, 2023

Apple disbanded their wireless router team in 2016 and discontinued the Time Capsule around 2018, we think this was a mistake but it makes sense due to their push towards iCloud and for other business reasons.

If you still have a couple of Apple Time Capsules around like we do in the office, you may want to be able to use it to easily share files between your Mac and PCs.

Obsolete Protocol

The reason your Windows 11 PC cannot connect to the Apple Time Capsule is due to the fact that Time Capsule shares files and folders using an obsolete and insecure protocol which has been disabled by default on modern versions of Windows (it's still enabled and works fine out of the box on the latest versions of macOS, including Ventura).

SMBv1

Server Message Block (SMB) is an application layer network protocol commonly used in Microsoft Windows to provide shared access to files and printers. SMBv1 is the original protocol developed in the 1980s, making it more than 30 years old. More secure and efficient versions of SMB are available today. Apple Time Capsule uses the SMBv1 protocol to share files.

Enabling SMBv1 on your modern PC

Under Control Panel Home, select Turn Windows features on or off to open the Windows Features box. In the Windows Features box, scroll down the list, clear the check box for SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support and select OK. After Windows applies the change, on the confirmation page, select Restart now.

Time Capsule On Windows

Now that your PC has restarted, you can access the Time Capsule by opening Explorer and clicking Network. Sometimes the device will not show up, in those cases open Applications > Utilities > Airport Utility on your Mac and take note of your Airport Time Capsule's IP address.

On your Windows PC, in Explorer enter \\ip.address, where IP address is the address you noted on your Mac.

Apple Hardware is Good!

Still have some older Apple hardware around like a MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.11? Sadly as apps get updated, more and more of them drop support for older Apple devices. You can keep your old Macbook Pros, Airs and iMacs running good as new with our app iBoostUp, even though it is updated roughly every month, still supports any Mac running OSX El Capitan or above. Grab it for free from the download page. Your old Mac will thank you!

Hope this helped, see you next time!
  ❤️ Maria