Here are a couple of middle-term geeky purchases I am planning.
1) A PS3. Assuming household budget to cover it, I will probably buy a Playstation 3 this year. Partly for the Blu-ray, and partly for the games. In truth, it’s more about the Blu-ray. Those of you who’ve visited probably know about my giant TV (or giant for me – before this I’d owned a well-used 26″ conventional TV). The TV’s a Sony Bravia XBR5. It’s got modern specs but is about 1.5 years old. I’ve lately been noticing that the TV is way too finely detailed for my old, slightly crappy Toshiba 5-disc DVD changer. When I watch action movies on the DVD changer with the TV, I get wavefronts of distortion in front of anything that’s moving quickly across the screen. Compared to the few HD movies I’ve downloaded to my XBox 360 and viewed on the TV, the conventional DVDs look like poop. So the PS3 has a built-in Blu-Ray DVD player, and since the world’s settled on that format (HD-DVD died last year) and Netflix does some Blu-ray rentals, I think that’s an obvious choice. But it can wait. It’s not like anything’s dying because I’m not purchasing the thing.
2) A new laptop. The current one, which is a refurb that was shipped when my even older laptop hit the 13-service-call lemon policy at Dell (3.5 years through its 4 year warranty), was sent to me on 2/24/2006, 3 years ago. For my original purchase price of probably $3400 or so, I got almost 7 years of use! I use laptops hard, and this one’s starting to actually come apart around the hinge. Turns out that the display is extremely high resolution for today’s standards. It’s a 15.4″ WUXGA screen, which means its native resolution is 1920×1200. Comparatively, consider that the highest resolution Apple (reknown for its general hardware usability) supports on 15.4″ displays is 1440×900. Honestly my 40 year old eyes are getting a little tired for a resolution (in my current laptop) that makes the fonts and other screen features as small as it does. Anyhow, I am considering the possibility of buying a lower resolution, smaller display (possibly a 13.3″ screen) laptop for a replacement. In fact, I am considering an Apple laptop. The primary problem here is cost. Apple makes high quality products but they are in general not known for cheapness. Not only would reducing the size and choosing lower than maximum specs of the package reduce overall cost, but the other thing I’m considering is buying via Apple’s special deals (i.e. refurbished products) store. I don’t think I need to move ahead with these plans either, at least until this laptop actually fails (at the hinge or elsewhere), but it’s good to know I’ve got options and good to know that the Apple refurbished store is there too.