I believe that the personal computer industry as a whole has failed miserably and it is time for someone to hit the reboot button. No company is more responsible for this than Apple. Everyone always knew Microsoft Windows was garbage and over the years it has only gained in bloated complexity and has never had reliability in basic functionality, but no one with an ounce of gray matter ever thought it would be different. Apple was different though. Apple was in a position to make a computer + OS ecosystem that just worked and worked well - something people could trust. But it seems that in the last decade they have only proven that their reach exceeds their grasp.
Why are we still in an age where rebooting devices remains the number one way to solve problems? Have the software developers gained any maturity in design over the last 40 years? It appears not. It is a growing frustration for me that something that could be such an aid has been implemented in ways that cause basic functionality to fail at the worst times possible and therefore people remain afraid of computer technology. And rightfully so. Why do I even need to know how to reboot my iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple router, etc.? Because they suck of course.
Sure I can use my iPhone and Apple Pay to pay for goods. Theoretically removing the need to carry a wallet with credit cards and cash. But that is not possible because you don't know when it will fail to work, and so still have to carry a credit card and cash as backup. Because they suck of course.
I can use my iPhone as a remote for my Apple TV, this removing the need for keeping a battery in the Apple TV remote or find it when needed. In fact, Apple went so far as to include the remote in iOS and it is accessible with just a simple swipe up. Great. Except completely useless when the iOS built-in remote cannot communicate with the Apple TV despite being on the same Wifi network. Perhaps forgivable, except that not only does the real remote work, but also the remote app on the iPhone also works - just not the built in iOS remote function. Because they suck of course.
How about this wonderful "purgeable storage" concept in Mac OS which reserves vast amount for disk space and interferes with downloading application updates from the App store. Apple Apps store. Apple's application (Xcode in this case). Completely Apple's ecosystem. They want you to apply updates but break the means to do so and provide no way to reclaim the space. Why would you do that? Because they suck of course.
They encourage the use of iCloud, which I do for Notes, but there can be unexplainable delays of 5-10 minutes between a note being created on one Apple device such as my iPhone and it showing up on my iPad. They encourage multiple devices and the use of Cloud services but make them untrustworthy. Because they suck of course.
For years there have been intermittent problems streaming from Apple when other network services like Netflix work fine. Drag and drop has always been buggy, whether in selection of text or dragging images. There is just no reliability of service any longer in any aspect of their business. Do they not understand how untrustworthy their services have become? How long must the beachball spin like this before hitting opt-cmd-escape? I had to stop recommending Apple to people years ago and now I look forward to the day when I no longer rely upon them. But sadly on this Christmas day there remain no better alternative.
Maybe next Christmas, Santa.
Showing posts with label Apple TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apple TV. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Correcting Recent Apple TV Gen 1 (ATV1) Woes
The first generation Apple TV (ATV1) is one of the products that Apple got right technically but seems to have later decided that the product didn't quite fit into their overall direction of making content cloud-based, and as a result there have been ongoing issues as they have pushed the second generation model forward. As I have now encountered two of these issues and I have no immediate plan to replace my ATV1 with an ATV2 I thought the problems and solutions to be blog-worthy.
Apple TV Not Authorized to Play Content
Sometime around October 28 users started to have problems trying to play content on the ATV1 that had been purchased and synced from another device, such as their Macintosh. Since it is common for ATV1 owners to make their purchases on iTunes and then sync the content to the ATV hard drive this was noticed by the community very quickly. People became frustrated that their recent purchases could not be played on their TV through the ATV. Fortunately the solution is simple. As documented in a November 19 post by Winston Churchill (really?) of Poulton-le-Fylde, United Kingdom and confirmed by others including myself, the solution is to purchase something else on the ATV1. Fortunately the thing you purchase can be free. One something is purchased on the ATV1 all content that you have purchased will again be playable. At the time the Ice Age short Scrat's Continental Crackup part 2 was free, so I "purchased" that using the ATV interface and afterward the ATV was able to play everything I had previously purchased.
Refusal to Sync with Apple TV following Lion 10.7.3 update
Yesterday I purchased a movie on the Apple TV and then tried to sync it back to my Macintosh and got the error "Apple TV is not responding. Check that any firewall software running on this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689." Having recently upgraded Lion to 10.7.3 I do not know if the root cause of this problem is Lion 10.7.3 or iTunes 10.5.3.
I first verified that the Apple TV was working fine and then for good measure unplugged it and re-plugged it and it came up fine. It is connected via Ethernet, so I knew that the wireless network could not be the source of the problem. I hadn't changed any security settings on my Mac recently, but to verify that the Firewall settings were not the problem I turned off the Firewall, and that still did not resolve the problem.
Finally I was able to solve the problem from within iTunes by doing the following:
- In iTunes right-click on the Apple TV icon in the sidebar under DEVICES to display the context menu.
- In the context menu there should be an option to Transfer Purchases from "Apple TV". Select that option.
- The recently purchased content on the ATV will then be transferred to the Macintosh. And after that you will be able to sync content back to the Apple TV again.
Apple TV Not Authorized to Play Content
Sometime around October 28 users started to have problems trying to play content on the ATV1 that had been purchased and synced from another device, such as their Macintosh. Since it is common for ATV1 owners to make their purchases on iTunes and then sync the content to the ATV hard drive this was noticed by the community very quickly. People became frustrated that their recent purchases could not be played on their TV through the ATV. Fortunately the solution is simple. As documented in a November 19 post by Winston Churchill (really?) of Poulton-le-Fylde, United Kingdom and confirmed by others including myself, the solution is to purchase something else on the ATV1. Fortunately the thing you purchase can be free. One something is purchased on the ATV1 all content that you have purchased will again be playable. At the time the Ice Age short Scrat's Continental Crackup part 2 was free, so I "purchased" that using the ATV interface and afterward the ATV was able to play everything I had previously purchased.
Refusal to Sync with Apple TV following Lion 10.7.3 update
Yesterday I purchased a movie on the Apple TV and then tried to sync it back to my Macintosh and got the error "Apple TV is not responding. Check that any firewall software running on this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689." Having recently upgraded Lion to 10.7.3 I do not know if the root cause of this problem is Lion 10.7.3 or iTunes 10.5.3.
I first verified that the Apple TV was working fine and then for good measure unplugged it and re-plugged it and it came up fine. It is connected via Ethernet, so I knew that the wireless network could not be the source of the problem. I hadn't changed any security settings on my Mac recently, but to verify that the Firewall settings were not the problem I turned off the Firewall, and that still did not resolve the problem.
Finally I was able to solve the problem from within iTunes by doing the following:
- In iTunes right-click on the Apple TV icon in the sidebar under DEVICES to display the context menu.
- In the context menu there should be an option to Transfer Purchases from "Apple TV". Select that option.
- The recently purchased content on the ATV will then be transferred to the Macintosh. And after that you will be able to sync content back to the Apple TV again.
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