Belkin backpack worn out after 11 months

Used daily for work: a Belkin slim backpack

The fabric was obviously too thin on the back and is now worn through after 11 months.

Other items like a plastic "Belkin" label have also split open just from normal use.

Don't buy this backpack.

Apple TV death.

My Apple TV is dead. All it does is blink-yellow on boot and never progresses to anything other than that. I suspected overheating as this was long an issue with it. Also I never knew of the suspend functionality (play key on the remote for six seconds) as it was not in the manual.

There are Apple Remote key sequences you can do to restart it, but they have no effect on it. The battery was good in the remote (it works elsewhere), so I dragged the thing into the Apple Store (you book a Genius bar appointment as a "Mac" as there is no special channel for an atv).

The helpful fellow took it out the back and plugged it into his TV. Ten minutes later we have a result - its dead. It is also 18 months old so well and truly out of warranty. My choices are (1) get a reconditioned 40Mb one (thats what this is) from Apple for about $165 as a replacement, or buy a new one for $229. The latter is $160Gb capacity, but otherwise it is the original 1Ghz Pentium class CPU design.

I chose option three. Wait for something new to come out soon. Dual ARM chips please!!!!!! But also to take apart the atv at home and see if something was not right with its insides.

OK, so the hard drive is fine. I put it in a caddy and it mounts when connected to my MBP. There are three volumes and the bigger two are HFS+ (a particularly fragile file system). Disk Utility verifies them fine. The first partition must be used for factory resets and the MBP did not know what it was let alone whether it is corrupt.

The fan works, therefore the power pack works. There are no loose connections and no reset button with a "click this if overheated". Thus I'll toss it in the recycling trash can.

Yet another Apple item that falls short of a five year goal for consumer electronics.

Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) useless after firmware upgrade

I upgraded the firmware using Airport Utility on Snow Leopard to 7.4.2, and the thing would not connect to the AT&T ADSL after that.

Debugging

I have a working Airport Express so I was able to copy every setting for TCP/IP, DHCP and alike but it would never connect again to the modem. The Airport Express works well, so I took my time researching the issues with the AEBS. I was not alone, others have part functioning ones that don't pipe data to/from the ADSL. "Ethernet Unplugged" seems a common issue.

Apple Store

In the San Francisco Apple store, with a Genius advising I find out that there's no repair available for a $169 item out of warranty. I buy a $99 Express (now has 802.11n whereas the older one I use for travel has the slower 802.11g only). I leave the old one with them; Cupertino might want to use it to help improve the line, but I'm told there is no mechanism to get them back to head office.

Ponzi Scheme

I'm increasingly coming to believe that Apple items are not designed to last three years. In fact I think they're running a an electronics Ponzi scheme. Sales for next year will cover warranty for this year. Similarly for those disgruntled outside of the warranty period, there is the allure of something better for effectively less to reduce the pain of writing the dead item off.

My advice? - buy the cheapest Apple products you can get away with. Don't buy multifuction devices. For example the TimeMachine versions of the AEBS seem to be a double trouble proposition. Ditto iMacs.