The Musings of Brian Groce

Watching the news last night and this morning I was left scratching my head as every news channel in town showed people camping out in the cold rain to get their hands on a PlayStation 3 when the stores opened this morning.

First, why would anyone shell out $599 on the first version of a video game console? Historically video game consoles have issues with their first versions and as subsequent versions come out the issues are fixed and the prices come down. So essentially, if you’re a die hard “cutting edge” person they charge you more for the honor of being a beta tester. (As is the case with many other electronics.) But of course, these are probably the same people who think nothing of plopping down $2500 for a “gaming PC”.

Anyway, for myself I can only see two reasons to have camped out for the PS3:

1. You’re planning on selling it on Amazon or eBay for a hefty profit.
2. You really want a Blu-ray Disc Player right now and don’t want to shell out $999.99 for the Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc Player…(But I can’t say how good of a DVD player the PS3 is.)

Beyond those two reasons, it just doesn’t make sense to me (and #2 is a stretch since Blu-ray goes along with what I’m talking about). But of course there’s no way I could personally justify the purchase right now anyway since I have very little time to watch movies or play video games and it makes more since to put the money towards something like my monthly mortgage. (In an average month I watch maybe two or three movies and just last weekend I dusted off my PS2 after probably close to a year of not touching it…and did I forget to mention that I don’t even own an HDTV or a TV with the fancy new TV technology that is available?) Call me old and/or boring, but hey, I just can’t do it right now. In the meantime I’ll stick with my PS2 and maybe consider a PS3 about three years from now.

When I saw the ICarta Stereo Dock for iPod with Bath Tissue Holder in a newspaper ad I thought that it had to be a joke, but sure enough someone has came up with the idea to allow people to dock their iPod close to the toilet. Brilliant! What a great way to get people to pay even more money to place their iPod only a few inches away from where it really belongs. Oh, the irony.

Seagate has announced their capability & plans to produce 2.5 terabyte (2500 gigabyte) 3.5″ hard drives (desktop sized) and 500 gigabyte 2.5″ hard drives (notebook sized) by 2009. I’m not much of a fan of Seagate drives after having one burn out on me, but if they can pull that off that is excellent news for those of us who require massive amounts of storage. While I currently have two 100GB hard drives in my notebook, the option to upgrade to 1TB would be excellent. Bring it on!