I trust you all enough to have you help me spend my money. And I thought it would be fun and informative at the same time.

On Friday, I will venture to the Apple Store at Tyson’s Corner. (I live in Pittsburgh, so it’s a 4 hour drive w/o traffic). Had I had this weekend off, I would have drove to the Mall of America, but that wasn’t to be.

So, I have $200 to spend. I recently got a tibook. Tell me what you would buy with that $200. Everytime I think of something to buy, I counteract with “oh, I don’t need that, or that’s not practical.”

Here’s what I have:

1. Bag
2. MP3 player
3. Digital camera
4. webcam (will have it soon)
5. Smartmedia reader (Zio!)
6. Leather protector thingy for the keyboard
7. CD burner (coming soon from Apple)
8. Printer

What would you buy? I’ve thought small scanner, soundsticks, and a few games (Escape from Monkey Island, Alice and Tropico look real good!). But maybe there’s more that I can’t think of.

Thanks for the help!

If you’re having trouble deciding you can send the $200 my way.  My address is…

Anyway, I’d suggest one of three things:

1) Scanner - I believe printers and scanners are essential parts of a complete computer system, but ask yourself one question:  do I want (and do I need) to scan lots of pictures?

—or—

2) SoundSticks - I love speakers because I hate using headphones at home.  That’s why I want my iSub support back in X.  Ask yourself if you want to be able to listen without headphones (or without the wimpy speaker sound) when at home/office.

—or—

3) Software - If you’ve got software you’re interested in, get it.  The hardware does you no good unless you’ve got the software you need/want to run on it.  I could spend thousands on a new TiBook, but if I couldn’t buy the software I need to do my new media work the TiBook purchase would have been worthless.

Hope that helps,
Brad

Brad, as usual, you help a lot.

Truth be told, I don’t have a lot of photos, and with my digital camera, I haven’t used my 35mm in a long time.

The soundsticks are so close in terms of a buy, but I wonder how practical they are for a portable computer. Works for home, sure, and when I’m on the road, I would use the headphones anyhow. But then I see that there are speakers out there that supposedly sound so much better than soundsticks. Dcantrel swears by the Klipsch speakers, although they don’t look as nice. So I don’t know what to do on the speaker front.

And then I think about software and I feel guilty thinking about games because I bought the tibook to be productive. But you have to have fun, too.

And then I think airport card and base station, but then I think—what will that really get me .. wireless access when I go to a starbucks somewhere in the nation that is wired for it, but how bad do I need that.

What I really want next year when the technology is improved is a wireless modem to use with my cell phone. Supposedly, we’re talking 280kbs downloading—compared to 56 on a dialup line, but that’s not available yet.

Tough choices. I’ll think of something though. Right now I’m leaning toward the games and some other small things. Maybe the keyspan remote control. But that has a lot of issues in X.

Hmmmmm. Back to the pondering stage.

I agree that my computer system would feel incomplete without a scanner, but if you don’t need it then I wouldn’t ask that you waste your money on something that will not get used.

Do you have anohter semi-recent Mac?  If you have a desktop computer that can also use AirPort, you could get two $99 AirPort cards for your $200 and run the desktop as a software base station.  I recently tried out a WaveLAN card on my PowerBook 5300c and the idea of being able to work online without being tied down to a certain place in the house or your office is very appealing.