Rotten apple.

I love Apple, I really do. Our family owns far more than our fair share of macbooks, ipods, airports, time capsules etc but I think I’ve finally found a worm in the Apple.

We recently purchased an Apple TV - believe me, there is only so many times you can watch the same episode of “My Hero” and “Black Adder” on BBC Entertainment (the only non-news/documentary English channel available to us) before you start developing a twitch. So I finally succumbed and agreed that we could get the Apple TV, which would allow us to watch a whole range of shows and movies, as well as youtubes if we wanted.

This was fine. Until we got it home and tried to connect it to the television. It doesn’t come with cables (which kind of makes sense, as there would be so many different cables for the different televisions) so began our quest for a cable that would make the box talk to the television. We couldn’t find the cable (we thought) we needed in the stores. That’s ok, we can buy it online. Another week passes and we finally get the cable in the mail.

It didn’t work.

That’s ok, there’s *another* cable that will (almost) definitely work. Again, not available in the store so we hop back online and order it. Another week passes.

It didn’t work.

Further googling suggests we need some kind of signal converter box thingy … hello, Ebay! We found it quite cheaply in Hong Kong, and after another week or two, it arrived. Of course, we needed to pay extra tax on it (and that whole post office experience is worthy of a blog post in itself!) but eventually I collect the parcel, and then off to Fona to buy a video component cable that we also needed to get the converter box talking to the television … “just get a cheap one!” he said. Well, they only have one and it wasn’t exactly cheap. Honestly though, by now I just don’t care anymore.

Of course NOW we needed to get a power point converter to match the American output on the signal converter box thingy to the European power points. Another morning of tromping around Copenhagen.

But FINALLY it’s all working at last (after a minor incident without any sound … at which point I was 0.3 seconds from throwing the whole lot out the window).

It’s *almost* worth the expense and effort just to be able to reclaim my computer because now Hugo can watch youtubes on television.

(I was going to do a Mastercard summary “Apple TV - xDKK, Useless cables - xDKK, Watching youtubes on television - priceless” but frankly it’s too depressing to think about how much it cost all up.)