Today I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro and a just-announced iPod Touch. Because I’m always nervous after I spend enormous amounts of money I went back to see what I’ve spent on similar stuff over the years. It blew my mind!
Here’s a very interesting breakdown of how things have evolved.
mid-May 2004: Used 2G iPod 20GB with a broken headphone port: $260
late-May 2004: Refurbished 3G iPod 20GB with Dock and AC Adapter: $299
late-Dec 2004: Refurbished PowerBook G4 12″ 1.33GHz/256MB RAM/60GB Hard Drive: $1349
mid-Feb 2008: 80GB 3.5G iPod 80GB with no accessories: $189
early-Sept 2009: Refurbished MacBook Pro Core2Duo 13.3″ 2.26GHz/2GB RAM/160GB Hard Drive: $999
early-Sept 2009: New iPod Touch 3G 32GB no accessories: $299
Un-friggin-believable! The last generation of the old-style plastic iPods was the best deal of them all; but Holy Christ! Five years after my first Apple purchase I can get a 32GB, solid state, touch sensitive, movie, music and photo player with WiFi capabilities, a web browser, email functionality and the processor and memory capacity to play mobile games at the level of a Nintendo DS PLUS a dual-core notebook with the ability to run both the latest Mac OS and the latest Windows OS for less than I paid for a slightly outdated road warrior machine in 2004?
And I can have the laptop on my desk within 20 hours of placing the order?
Sign me up, please!
I’ll even forgive Steve his god-damned shiny f**king screen.
The iPod, however, is coming directly off the factory floor. It left China yesterday. That’s what you get for buying new gear within an hour of it being revealed to the world.