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The Rules of Thumb For Tech Purchasing
Hugh Pickens writes "Sam Grobart writes in the NYT that buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options because the reality is that most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend, and that means making trade-offs. Grobart puts forward his set of rules for getting the most for your tech dollar when buying computers, cameras, cellphones, data plans, and service contracts. For example, Rule No. 1: pay for PC memory, not speed. 'When buying and configuring a new computer, companies often give the option of upgrading the processor and adding more memory, or RAM. If it is an either/or proposition, go for the RAM,' writes Grobart. 'Processors are usually fast enough for most people; it is the RAM that can be the bottleneck.' Other rules include 'Pay for the messaging, not the minutes,' 'Pay for the components, not the cables,' 'Pay for the sensor size, not the megapixels,' and 'Pay for the TV size, not the refresh rate.' Kevin Kelly expands on Grobart's rules of thumb with 'Pay for the glass, not the shutters,' 'Pay for reliability, not mileage,' and 'Pay for comfort, not for weight.' Any others?"
Read TFA, not TFS.
To give two real life stories to explain my point.
A person I know turned up at a shop and demanded that she wanted "The Best". Aside from telling the salesman that you're a mug, she basically got the most expensive laptop in the shop, and now she runs Word, IE 8 and a ton of Spyware on a high end machine.
Another story involves the missus trying to choose between two laptops, one of which was an i3 with a large screen, and another which was an i5 with a smaller screen. I asked her what she was planning on doing with it, she told me she wanted to use it for watching videos and the like, so she got the i3. For myself, given I don't really need the screen real-estate and could use the cycles for my developing, picked up the i5.
So before you ask anything, find out what you're planning on doing with it. There's no such thing as 'the best'. An i7 tower with a demon of a graphics card is great for gameplay, but you try taking that on a train or to take lecture notes on. Similarly, a 'netbook' is great if you need a ton of battery life and the ability to carry it around without snapping your back, but sucks if you want to "pwn some n00bs" at online gaming.
#1 rule, no matter what you buy. Plasma vs. LCD, car vs. SUV vs. truck, laptop vs. desktop, handgun vs. rifle vs. shotgun, or even rent/lease vs. own.
If you don't know your real requirements for a purchase, then you're just shooting in the dark, or have already made up your mind based on peer pressure. The best example of sheer peer pressure/brand pushing can probably be best summarized within 80% of Apple sales. The other 20% actually know what they're buying and actually need it.
As long as Windows applications are almost universally 32bit, this is pointless. As long as the system has 4GB, the rest is "nice to have for future", nothing more.
Bullshit. Running 32-bit apps just means that no single app can have all of that RAM mapped into its address space at once. Even if you're only running a single 32-bit app, 6GB means that you have 2GB left over for the OS, most of which is used for filesystem caches. More likely, you're running half a dozen 32-bit apps. With 6GB, each one now has a maximum of 512MB of physical RAM before you have to go to swap (ignoring the OS requirements), which is well within the limits of a 32-bit address space.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A lot of people buy stuff as a replacement of their personalities.
FTFY
For example - "Pay for RAM, not speed. The speed of the computer chip does not matter; the attention-span or RAM memory does matter."
Totally wrong. You can always throw in more ram at a later date, and it will probably cost less to replace all of it than the cost of the "upgrade" today. Upgrading ram on a laptop is even easier than on a desktop, while a cpu upgrade ... forget it. And you'll always find takers for your old ram.
Or "Pay for components, not cables. Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables". While you don't have to pay a monster price for "Monster Cables", some HDMI cables don't meet the latest specs. The difference between those that do and the cheapest may only be a few bucks, and it can't hurt.
Or "Pay for speed, not channels. For cable internet, with enough speed you can watch TV channels on the internet for free." Pay for bandwidth. Speed means nothing if you have a low bandwidth cap. And buying a pair of bunny-ears for your HDTV can give a better picture over the air than either the net OR cable.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
And for those who don't think gas prices will go that high, they already are in many parts of the world (and you can bet that cash-strapped state and federal governments are going to need to raise more taxes).
Think of how many people bought their cars when gas prices were half what they were today. When buying a car today, you have to keep in mind that history tends to repeat itself.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Oh, and don't buy Apple... unless "cool" is worth a ~100% tax to you.
buy Apple if you see extra value in the operating system and the model you are considering to buy has been refreshed recently.
My experience is that Apple computers are usually priced quite competitively at the date of their release but their refresh cycles tend to be very long and there generally are no discounts until an improved revision is released - so Apple's offerings become more and more overpriced towards the end of the cycle.