A Barrel of This • Blog

This is the start of a list of bugs or design quirks that I encounter in my daily use of Apple products of which I own plenty (an embarrassing number really). I’m not an Apple fan boy but, I do like my products to work together and not get in my way. Apple pretty much gets that right. However, there are issues both large and small that disrupt the otherwise seamless cohesion of One Infinity Loop products. Here are some off of the top of my head. I’ll add more as they pop up.

Your Airport Base Station has done a runner

This problem has been around for some time and is probably my number one annoyance. I believe I’m on my fifth straight Apple laptop (the first was a Lombard Powerbook G3 and the latest is a 17" MacBook Pro) and I’ve used wireless routers since they first became available. When I open my laptop it often fails to reconnect to my wireless network. Doesn’t matter if I’m at home or, in the past, at the office. It is the little problem that could.

At the moment, with Mac OS X 10.6.4 I have to “Turn AirPort Off” and then “Turn AirPort On” in order to reconnect to my Airport Extreme (802.11n) Base Station (running version 7.4.2) at home. An Apple product consistently failing to connect to another Apple product. Not so much with the happiness making.

I’m not sure I even want to know how to solve it if there is in fact a work around. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with myself or all that new found free time if I didn’t have to down the en1 interface (I do know a slight bit about what’s going on underneath the UI) and bring it back up each time I open my laptop.

Honestly, how hard can it be to solve this problem that has plagued OS X from the start? The revised UI in Snow Leopard at least gives the user some indication that something is happening with the animated strength signal icon. It takes a fair amount of time for the search for my last known working network to fail. If it fails, why not just reestablish the interface? It doesn’t take that much longer and at that point I’m it to win it. I really do want my network back.

Apple TV crashes

Our current Apple TV crashes just about every other time we use it. It seems to crash whenever my wife is at the remote which is not entirely stunning seeing as how she is a Quality Assurance (QA) engineer and lots of things crash around her. The problem has improved slightly over time.

Of course, I’ve rewarded Apple by pre-ordering the new Apple TV like a lemming. The problem is: once your in, your in. I’m very much in with Apple TV. It is one of the few products I’ve convinced other people to buy. People who are in fact not nerds like myself and don’t normally spend money on tech products just to see if they can get them to fail in new and spectacular ways.

The Apple TV does work fairly well on the whole. I have not filled the 180GB storage space with music yet but, we are getting close. I bought the new edition of the hardware solely because of the Netflix feature. My XBox moved downstairs and with it moved the Netflix access. We have a Blu Ray DVD player from Samsung that offers Netflix but, the UI of the player and the Netflix component is awful. It wouldn’t pause properly and would restart the program if you did attempt a pause. Samsung fixed the problem with a firmware download (that claimed 30 minutes of my life). But, come on, it’s 2010. You shipped this thing without it being able to pause?

I’m a bit nervous about the lack of a backup with the new hardware as everything will apparently stream now. That means I need to find a new backup solution for my digital music collection. Also, the sneak preview of “Freakonomics” that we watched on the Apple TV did have some streaming issues. It was actually the first time we’d ever encountered any problems with the streaming on the Apple TV. Not a pleasant surprise nor is it filling me with confidence for the next generation. Full report when it arrives.