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.