Tag Archives: Apple

Tuesday Tech Blog: Help, my Apple TV can’t connect to iTunes

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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.

Time for a Tech blog: Why iOS 6 is the most disappointing update for iPhone ever.

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I’ve held off on this inevitable rant in part because there has been more than sufficient coverage of Apple’s problems with the new version of iOS for phones, pads, and music players. However, today Tim Cook released an apology regarding the flawed Apple maps app and I feel it did not go far enough. I have been using the new iOS for over a week now and I cannot find one improvement that justifies its release. Two of the marquee features, maps and passbook, are inadequate and diminish the user experience to unacceptable levels.

With maps, the turn-by-turn functionality was so long overdue that other more credible apps have already negated the need for Apple to provide this in it’s built in program. Beyond the full featured GPS apps from big navigation firms, even the simple Mapquest app already provides free, voice-guided, turn-by-turn functionality on the iPhone. Apple is just simply too late to this party. What I would like to have seen was a basic improvement of the existing Google Maps that had been integrated with all prior versions of iOS. The search functionality and street views from the Google were great, but the mobile app on iPhone never harnessed the deep potential of being connected to Google on the web. At my desk computer I can reroute suggested routes to fit my own knowledge of back roads and save these customized routes to my maps. I can later share these with relatives looking to avoid going through the “bad part of town” that simply does not register with any automated routing algorithms. I also have customized maps for my own road trips that hit points of interests my wife and I have found in New England wondering and would like to be able to bring these up on the app version of Google maps for later reference. To this end it would have been helpful if Apple had worked more closely with Google to make their mapping app capable of real time geo-tagging. Marking a spot on a map and referencing it later opens up all kinds of social potential. Whereas the existing integrated app focused on “where am I now”, it could have expanded to” where have I been and where am I going”. This extra dynamic would have fulfilled more of the potential of having our maps in our pockets.

The second major flaw in iOS 6 is passbook, which I can honestly say is the most ill-conceived app ever released. Open it up and it does nothing. Zipo! Instead of providing even a single example pass or coupon, this app directs you to the app store to download yet even more apps from which the options are currently dull and uninteresting. Once you choose from the small handful of compatible apps, these still do not integrate directly with passbook, but instead install as separate icons on the device. But wait, you are still not done! Open the extra app and try to figure out how to get this to appear in pass book and you will find multiple additional steps including signup and other options. Why is this not tied into the Apple ID? Why am I not already in passbook? Anyway, if you have not given up out of frustration already you can then perhaps view a Target coupon in passbook. Want more passbook apps? Well that may be a problem. Now that you do have that one app in passbook, the convenient link to the hidden App store section for more passbook compatible apps is no longer visible. Honestly, it may no longer be available either since I have yet to find it. Check the general iPhone settings and looks for any passbook specific options… nada. Go to the App store directly and either search on “passbook” or look for a category and you also find nothing! At this point getting more than a coupon seems impossible, or at the very least way more effort than I am willing to spend on an app that was supposedly designed to simplify my tracking of these sorts of items.

With this all said maps is perhaps far worse than passbook as a feature on iOS 6. I believe the rancor regarding passbook has only been silenced by the deluge of complaints on maps because at least as a non-functional add on to the iOS experience nothing has been lost by having this vestigial limb hanging around. The map app is clearly a bigger issue not because of its own inherent flaws but because it replaced what had been a solid feature available on all our devices when we purchased them. If Apple wants delve into its own mapping app that is fine, but it is a great and inappropriate disservice to remove functionality that was paid for. I find it ironic that Apple has gone out of its way to track all of my music and app purchases so that I might forever download them from the cloud on demand, but it will not make available for download the integrated apps it has despotically removed from my device. Apology not sufficient and not accepted. Bring back Google maps now.