A Pox on Apple
Last weekend I upgraded my AppleTV to “Take Two” and my MacBook Pro and Mac Mini from Tiger to Leopard. I also bought an Airport Extreme and an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard. Oh boy, that was fun…
Here’s a list of the problems I’ve encountered:
- The AppleTV is now unfit for its intended purpose. After 3-5 minutes of playing a video playback now stops for about twenty seconds before continuing on again. Rewinding back over those twenty seconds and playing again lets me watch what was missed, and playback continues as expected for the rest of the video. Of course, by this point, I’ve been completely taken out of the reality of what I’ve been watching, and it’s ruined for me. This happens for every single video that I watch, regardless of whether or not the Apple TV is connected to the network. It also occurs for both videos bought from the iTunes Music Store and those which I’ve encoded from DVD myself. Prior to the update videos played without issue.
- The AppleTV now seems sluggish to respond to input from the remote control.
- After upgrading to Leopard, iTunes no longer recognised that my iPhone was plugged in. iPhoto would happily still import photos though. This was fixed by reinstalling iTunes from Apple’s website.
- Folder Actions are now borked. They work, but after an undetermined amount of time and without warning they deactivate themselves.
- Trying to view webpages published at http://localhost/~username/ now results in a 403 forbidden error. Bizarrely this also happens on sites set up within MAMP as well.
- After installing Leopard on my Mac Mini the wireless stability dropped horribly. Buying an Airport Extreme for £120 “fixed” this. In fairness my Mac Mini had very weak wireless under Tiger anyway, but Leopard reduced availability to almost none.
- The new Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, whilst having a very nice action, refuses to hold a connection for more than a couple of minutes. When it does have a connection System Preferences says that it has a full battery.
So, there we go. Frankly, right now I’m not looking forward to the iPhone update that should be just around the corner.