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Consumer Temptations, February 2011 Edition

11:44 Mon 21 Feb 2011
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I haven’t been tempted to buy any expensive items for a while now. I’ve been buying smaller stuff, and am hardly immune to the siren call of consumerism, but haven’t been inclined towards any major purchases; that seems to have changed this week.

The next generation of MacBook Pros is rumored to be coming out next week, and I kind of want one. I don’t really need one, but this machine is fairly old at this point and it does creak occasionally. That doesn’t happen when I’m less ridiculous about how many browser tabs I have open, but it still pushes me to wanter newer, faster, hardware. I think I’ll hold out as long as possible, however, because they’re pretty expensive, and I really shouldn’t go for a replacement until I absolutely need to. Also, I want to make the shift to SSD drives, and they’re still too expensive per GB at the moment. Really this machine should be fine for another year at least, especially given that I mainly just write, browse, and code on it, and none of those require a lot of power.

I have a Dell 3008WFP monitor at work, and it’s a fantastic monitor. 1600 pixels of vertical resolution is amazing. So I want one at home, naturally. However, I already have a pretty good monitor at home, the Dell 2407WFP, and sitting in front of it right now I have to admit it’s perfectly adequate for what I’m doing. More than adequate, really. There’s another consideration: I would want to do something with this monitor if I got a new one, and at the moment Mac laptops only seem to be able to reliably drive one external monitor, not two. (This means that if the new MBPs that come out next week can run additional monitors I’m going to be really tempted to get both one of those and a new monitor; luckily, that capability seems unlikely to be added.)

I haven’t turned on my television in quite some time, and am planning to get rid of it sometime soon. That makes me want to replace it, either with some flatscreen television or with a projector, both of which would likely end up being far too expensive for something that, at the moment, I don’t use at all (anything I watch right now, I watch on this monitor).

I want more disk space than my laptop currently provides, but a severe distrust of consumer hard drives makes me unwilling to just use a single external hard drive as the only place where anything is kept. So I’d like an external RAID box, really. Those start getting a tad expensive if you want decent ones, and as the price climbs so do the capabilities I want, until I arrive at something like the Synology DS1511+, which is designed as a RAID 5 NAS for small businesses. Very likely overkill, but the products below that level all feel quite lacking. I might end up with this, because at the moment I’m trying to clear out the various machines and hard drives I have around my apartment, which requires storage, and there’s no point in backing up to unreliable storage… but it’s still overkill.

Another purchase related to backing stuff up is the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M. I’m trying to cut down the amount of paper I have around my apartment, and the best approach for me with this is to scan it and store it digitally (otherwise I’m too worried that I’ll get rid of something I’ll need in future). This scanner is apparently really good at that particular task, and I suspect that makes it the most likely thing on this list for me to buy—although I’ll try to put that off until it’s clear that I really do need it, rather than buy it only to discover that I don’t have as much stuff that has to be scanned as I thought.

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3 Responses to “Consumer Temptations, February 2011 Edition”

  1. helen Says:

    You have to buy the new-generation MacBook Pro so that I can vicariously live through your consumption.

  2. Tadhg Says:

    Great, now I have a quasi-justification for buying it because it’d be an altruistic act…

  3. Seth Milliken Says:

    >This means that if the new MBPs that come out next week can run additional monitors I’m going to be really tempted to get both one of those and a new monitor; luckily, that capability seems unlikely to be added.

    “You can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices, including up to two high-resolution displays.”
    http://www.apple.com/au/macbookpro/features.html#thunderbolt

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