I have been a fan of Apple computers since the early 90’s. In college I worked as a Mac tech, and I have owned no less than 4 desktops, 3 laptops, and 3 iPods. Apple is rumored to be working on some sort of tablet to be released shortly. All of my friends think that I am going to crack and buy it when it is released. I don’t think I will, and my reasoning here is probably pretty good advice for anyone looking to cut down on the amount of electronics purchased.
There are a couple of different ways to go in order to optimize your spending. The first way is the King of the Hill approach. This means you purchase the biggest and best system out there as soon as it is available, and then replace it as soon as a new model comes out, selling the old one on eBay for Craigslist. This way you always have the latest and greatest, but you put some effort into constantly upgrading and finding a buyer for your old equipment.
The other is the Lion in Waiting. Here, instead of running out and buying the first version of something when it is announced, you sit back and wait for the device to either come down in price or until a later version of the device(or a competing product) gets more features incorporated into it, and then you pounce. The issue here is that you may be hopelessly out-of-date with a device for awhile, but you also can’t get burned when the inevitable upgraded version comes out. Remember the iPhone early adopters found that just a few months later, Apple had dropped the price while creating a better phone, and those folks were pretty much screwed.
The two approaches work best when you are talking about Apple hardware, since there are some predictable things going on here- Apple tends to release a product (say, the iPod) and then keep the price point the same while adding storage capacity or other features year after year. However, you can apply this sort of logic to just about any electronics purchase.
The King of the Hill approach works best for actual computers, while the Lion in Waiting works better for mobile devices. What we come to expect from a computer is quite standard at this point- we have looked at the same key specs for the last 20 years: Processor Speed, amount of RAM, Hard Drive size, and Screen Size. Every year, these continue to get larger and faster and cheaper, but there is not a lot of innovation left in what they do. However, if you look at the market for mobile devices, they change radically from model to model. 5 years ago, people understood that their phones were also going to be their music players, but who saw them turning into GPS devices that were going to help us get around? When the new iPhone comes out, you are going to have a hard time selling the one you just bought last year, because everyone that wants an iPhone is going to want the one with the newest features. The King of the Hill approach doesn’t work, because no one wants to buy the obsolete phone. However, a computer with slightly order specs is going to still be able to do all the things the new one does, so there is a better market for used items.
So this brings us to the forthcoming Apple Tablet- I am sure it is going to be badass. I can’t wait to see the thing, and I will probably drool over all the cool stuff that it does. However, that’s a product that I am going to take the Lion in Waiting approach on. Whatever the thing can do, it will do more things in the 2011 model, so why not wait for that one, if I decide that it is something that I really have to have?
