by Christopher Breen, Macworld.com  

Sleek and capable as Apple’s products are, they have their bad days like the rest of us. And when they do, you’ll want to know how to back out of a bad situation as gracefully as possible. That is the subject of this week’s video—dealing with common iPhone, Apple TV, and iTunes Store annoyances.

In the course of the video I show you how to:

• Avoid long iPhone backups (and all iPhone backups, for that matter).
• Force-quit a frozen iPhone application.
• Throw your iPhone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) mode for restoring it when it appears to be dead.
• Restart, diagnose, or restore an Apple TV with a hidden Apple Remote command.
• Beg Apple to allow you to download an aborted iTunes Store purchase.

All this, in under six minutes!

Download Macworld Video #62

• Format: MPEG-4/H.264
• Resolution: 320 x 240 (iPhone & iPod compatible)
• Size: 7.8MB
• Length: 5 minutes, 30 seconds

Show Notes

I said I would do it, and so I shall. The Terminal command to disable iPhone backups is:

defaults write com.apple.itunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

and to undo that work so that iTunes does back up your iPhone, enter this:

defaults write com.apple.itunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

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This episode of the Macworld Video marks the debut of our sponsor, Tenba, makers of the Air Case, body armor for your Apple computers.