How to Turn Off Apple TV

Contributor Icon Contributed by David Kirk     
Tag Icon Tagged: Apple Mac  

No power button exists. Do you have to unplug this beast to get it to turn off? Here is what you need to know about powering down you Apple TV.


I have heard of people doing crazy things to turn their Apple TVs off. Yes, there is no power button. Without unplugging it, you can not actually turn it off. But wait… that’s a good thing.

By holding down the play button on the apple remote for a few seconds, you can put it into standby mode. This mode stops the TV output. However, similiar to a DVR device, the box remains powered on.

The Apple TV uses this downtime to sync your library your your box.

Likewise, the Apple TV experience really requires zero wait. If you had to wait for OS X to reboot everytime you wanted to watch a movie or listen to music, the box would be a pain.

Hold the play button to blacken the screen and forget about the fact that the box continues to work while you are away.

 

4 Comments -


  1. den said on November 13, 2009

    The Apple TV consumes about 13W all the time it’s on.

    So I’d have to disagree, I think waiting 1 minute for it to boot is a small price to save 300 watt-hours a day.

    I put a switch on mine, but I’d like to know (from someone who really knows) if there’s any harm done by turning off the AC power.

  2. John said on March 27, 2010

    I agree, I don’t use it often enough to keep it on. Also, you have to be on the home menu for pressing the button for 6 seconds to work. I can’t tell you how many times I’m not feeding Apple TV to my system, notice it’s on and try and turn it off. I end up having to get the blasted thing up on my TV to turn it off. Apple is STUPID sometimes.

  3. Drgrafix said on January 4, 2011

    Just found this because I was searching (still am) with the hope that some genius has figured out a way to _safely_ power down the ATV. When I finish setting up my Gen1 ATV, I might be using it once or twice a week if that. I have DirecTV and Comcast Cable, so I have a gazillion channels to keep me occupied. My ATV is running XMBC and my only goal was to set it up as a video jukebox for archived movies on an external drive. If somebody is smart enough to hack into the ATV’s software, you’d think figuring a way to power on/off wouldn’t be that tough… but I profess no such skills. I just think leaving it on… even in “Standby” is unnecessary. We use the sleep function on our macs because we are _using_ them on a daily basis, sometimes for hours on end. Wasting _any_ electricity is not smart, and I know using a wall timer or pulling the plug is probably not good either. You wouldn’t do that on your mac, would you? This question needs a green solution and one that will not “shock” the ATV. Apple is usually smarter than this… after all, you can power down a Mac, an iPhone, or an iPad… so why not an AppleTV?

  4. Anonymous said on January 4, 2011

    This was a huge complaint with the first generation of the Apple TV. Between trying the sync and being constantly available, power off just wasn’t an option. I have heard of people that manually power off/on the device (ie pull the plug) but inevitably the device gets corrupt or dies.

    It’s hard to blame Apple when you even admit that you are running the device in a way that wasn’t intended–XMBC. :)

    If you have already patched your Apple TV, can’t you just SSH into the device and do a ’sudo shutdown’ ?

 

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