The little black box just sits there streaming Netflix and iTunes Radio day after day and then all of a sudden it stops working and reports that it cannot connect to iTunes Store or verify your Apple ID. Everything else on your WiFi is working and Apple servers are not down, so what happened? Ah it must one of those pesky updates that Apple pushes to the TV, like a recently added icon or something. Well maybe, but my recent experience revealed just how many variables can be at play in getting this delicate little device to work properly.
As a consequence of having too many consumer electronics piled up in the house I inevitably find myself debugging issues that fill help desk boards and frustrate the many people who have bought into the same little gadgets that I have. Today I’m sharing the pains and joys of owning an Apple TV box which I have been using for several months to stream movies and shows, flip up content from my iPad, or use as a convenient stereo for playing music. After a recent move, I hooked it up to the same TV with no trouble at all and it began working right away. Then it just stopped. I mean it seemed to seize up and die. I tried logging in and out of the iTunes store, resetting at the various levels available until I finally went DEFCON 3 and tried to set it back to factory defaults. This of course failed because without access to the Apple servers (via iTunes Store) the full reset could not complete.
What could I do? Well my box is less than a year old so I knew Apple would just give me a new one if I brought it back and explained that I had exhausted all options. The geniuses complied without a fight and I brought my new Apple TV home to setup just like the old one. Right out of the box… it worked! So great this means it wasn’t my setup or home WiFi that blocked out the access; it had to be the old Apple TV itself. Well… maybe not.

I figured it would be nice to stick the Apple TV on the back of my Panasonic flat screen. I grabbed some Velcro tape and slapped it on the back side of the TV, sat back all proud of my new layout. That’s when the unconsidered variable became undeniable. The new little black box seized up just like the old one. But it had been working! Then again the old box had also been working when I first hooked it up in this new location. What became apparent was that both boxes worked fine when sitting on the shelf right after I plugged in the cables, but quickly stopped working right when I was certain that I had no problems. The one common step I took after the initial hook up was to stick the Apple TV unit on the back of my television. I cannot explain what may cause the interference but I can confirm that as soon as I pulled the Apple TV off of the television I was able to get it working again without issue.
I write all this here because while I searched for solutions to my problem I saw many boards littered with vitriol for Apple blaming them for a lack of support on this “hobby” item and poor beta testing before releasing new software. These are all valid complaints that do relate to real issues I have seen with several Apple products. In addition, the tendency for any help desk to blame the user makes for unproductive dialog and facilitates a repeat of common issue without ever getting to the root cause. However, there always remains the possibility of an unconsidered variable however unlikely it may seem from the start. In my recent experience I had no trouble with Apple once I demonstrated that I had done all of the standard triage procedures for an issue like this one. I got my warrantied new unit without a fight and suffered no interrogation.
Note: the model of my Panasonic TV has a DVD player built into it. There is no internal WiFi or Bluetooth signal and I have no other devices attached to this TV besides the Apple TV box.