Order of buying stuff

With all this crazy economy stuff going on, I'm not too keen to go out and spent a whole bunch of money on stuff that I don't actually need. But there are 3 major purchases that I "need" to do over the next little while, and I talked to my Dad tonight about how to prioritize them.

• New Dell Desktop
• Apple MacBook/MacBook Pro/Mac Mini
  
• Canon Digital SLR

The situation is that my current Dell Laptop is a beast, and so the portability is minimal. Also, it's nearing 4 years old, and as reported back in February I've had a blue vertical line on my LCD screen. It disappeared for about 3 months, and then came back, and joining it is a nice pretty purple line, too. As if it was just waiting for me to talk about it, I was discussing the state of my laptop with my Dad today and now there is a red vertical line too. So it's literally getting to the end of the line here, and I'm gonna have to replace this with something sooner or later.

So I think I am going to go with the Desktop first. This is the most immediate, and I'll just do the usual dual-boot with Vista (I heard Vista Ultimate is good for connecting to a TV, etc) and Ubuntu. But I basically never use my Linux install, and so I'll just keep that at a reasonable but small-ish partition (eg 10 Gb).

The problem is that I want to get started on iPhone App Dev with Matt Parrott but we're taking a while to get the ball rolling on it. Once we are going, it would be a LOT easier and better to have 2 Macs we could work on rather than having to work over each other's shoulder for the first project. So that's not great, and implies that I should get the MacBook earlier. Also, Apple is supposedly releasing their new MacBooks on Tuesday, so that is cool too. But I don't usually use the laptop for portability, and I have an iPod Touch if I really need to email some people from a place with WiFi. So the necessity for a portable computer specifically is less now. And also if Matt and I actually don't end up doing iPhone Apps then it's going to be less important to have a MacBook right away.

The camera would be sweet to have now, but in all honesty my trip to Japan is at least 14 months away, and so I have plenty of time to buy a camera and learn how to use it later.

So I think the plan will be to get the Dell Desktop first, and unfortunately this is the most expensive piece of the puzzle... probably at least $1300 with the dual-monitor setup too. Bugger. But I think it'll be a great machine and I'm excited for it. Plus I seem to be saving pretty well lately, and I'll keep that up so I can re-build my savings quickly after paying for the computer. Sweet.

Alrighty, so with that all settled... it's back to looking at the Dell computers, and learning Objective-C offline without using a Mac. When the Apple MacBook announcement comes this week, I'll just have to look on with evny and say, "well, maybe next year" hehe. Good times.