A moment of unfettered materialism

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Last year there were a number of things I wanted to purchase; several of those goals were achieved, most notably the Nintendo Wii. Cellphone-wise I owned (and still own) a Blackberry 7100g. I also wanted to get a laptop; I ended up settling for the Toshiba Satellite A55-S1063, and was bitten - hard - by the results of trading performance for low price. (I’m looking to get rid of the damn thing, actually.) This year, however, there are a whopping two things I want to own, and my goal is to have both of them by the end of the year. What are they?

1. Apple MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro

First: storytime.

When I was a sophomore, I picked up one of the Apple iBook G3s - one of the last G3s they’d ever build, in fact. I skimped on RAM a little (but picked up more later on the cheap), and the hard drive (20 GB) was small, but it was still one of the best machines I’ve ever used. It went to San Francisco with me to WWDC 2003 (hell, using it for development was how I got to go to WWDC 2003 in the first place). It garnered me a very small amount of internet fame through a pair of blog clients I wrote, and gave me my first taste of the Mac developer community.

Then I knocked it off a desk.

Perhaps that’s not quite right: what actually happened was that my tan trenchcoat, hanging from the back of my high-backed leather office chair (ostentatious and ridiculous in a dorm, no doubt), knocked my open iBook from the desk to the concrete-with-2-cm-of-carpet floor. It landed, actually, in the same position it had been sitting. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the death knell for the tough little bastard. (Sidebar: my iBook had been dropped while closed and in a bag, from shoulder-height to concrete, twice.) It continued to run for the next three weeks despite not quite closing level anymore (and not latching shut at all), then - the Monday before I had to present my Honors thesis - for some godawful stupid reason I decided to shut it down.

Poor Sophocles was never to turn on again. The power button was utterly useless.

(Sidebar: all my computers have been named after Western philosophers. Kant was an IBM NetVista who’s now in various pieces in various places, Sophocles was my iBook G3, Kierkegaard is the Mac Mini G4 I given as a graduation gift by my mom, Aquinas is my Toshiba, Quine is the graphite G4 desktop in my closet, and the PC in our living room [affectionately nicknamed 'TVputer'] is actually named Mill. The Sun SparcStation 5 next to my desk technically has no name because I don’t even know if it has an OS [because I have NO peripherals that work on it], but I’d likely call it Diogenes.)

I’ve gone through a series of computers, running Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and BeOS (yes, BeOS). I’ve been bitten many, many times by my own impatience - jumping for the solution I can afford (the iBook, the Toshiba) rather than the one I want or need. Not this time, dammit.

I’m determined that the next computer I buy will be a MacBook Pro. 15″, preferably (I think the 17″ is just too unwieldy to be traveling back and forth from home to school with me on the nights I have grad classes, which is primarily one of my laptop’s duties). Honestly, as long as I keep my spending in control for the next couple months (and that won’t be difficult, because Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will be keeping me occupied as far as videogames go, save for Hotel Dusk in a couple months) I could have one of these by the end of February/middle of March. It’s just getting the discipline to do it.

I think I can manage. Of course, selling off my old computers will help. I’m probably going to get rid of the Toshiba and the SparcStation soon, possibly even the Mac mini if I can back all my stuff up onto an external drive then drive to Kenwood and pick up the MacBook Pro. If anyone’s interested in any of these, drop me an email and make your best offer. (The SparcStation’s pocket change, but the Toshiba and the Mac mini - assuming they go for eBay-esque prices - would be huge steps forward.)

I’ll keep you updated.

Now what, you might ask, could the other thing I want be?

2. Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500

Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500

There’s no story behind this one: I just want one of these. Honestly, they’re only $349; Borders has them, so anytime I get paid I could go down and get one. Hell, I might do it next Monday.

But it’d set me back on the MacBook Pro, so I have to keep that in mind. :)

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