1. Wii
Yes, it really is that great. See the post that will follow immediately for a list of video games, but yes, even a 35 year old woman (albeit, one whose electronics fetish has won her a description as a "bewitching combination of yuppie and 14-year-old-boy) can be very, very glad she owns it. If you have a family, or entertain at all frequently, you'll want to order a couple of extra remote controllers and nunchucks so that four can play at one time. 2. Wii Fit
The Wii Fit is both surprisingly fun, and a surprisingly good workout. It won't challenge you if you're a real gym rat, but for the rest of us, the strength and yoga exercises especially are actually pretty good at increasing strength. And the balance work is good for nearly everyone, because unless you're a dancer or a gymnast, that's a skill most Americans never work on. Many of the included games, like ski jumping, are actually fun, but the Wii Fit also opens you up for games like cheerleading, which is on my wish list for this Christmas.
3. Sony Blu-Ray Player My housemate, who is a massive film buff, owns this, and I was somewhat surprised to find that even for a casual filmgoer like me, the quality really does make a difference. Films like Blade Runner are astonishing on a Blu-Ray player and a good television. If you're sure you'll never want 7-channel surround sound, you can buy the cheaper model, the S350, which offers most of the other features for $100 less; you'll still get the crystal clear picture and sound.
You don't want this player if your television is smaller than 40 inches; the housemate, and several electronics publications, aver that you won't be able to see much difference.
4. Panasonic Viera 50-inch television This is the TV that is gracing my housemate's crazy media room in the new place. It remains CNET's second best-rated HDTV (the first best, Pioneer's Kuro, is by all accounts the best HDTV out there for any money. It also retails for $4500. Even my housemate isn't that crazy.) The picture is beautiful, and the features are not only actually useful, but easy to use, which is a plus when your housemate likes to fiddle with colors and aspect ratios while muttering. Fair warning: if you want to wall mount it, or put it on a stand, you'll need something fairly substantial, because these weigh quite a lot.
5. Tivo HD I know--I'm like a crazy broken record, telling you that you want to spend hundreds of dollars rather than just get the DVR that your cable company rents you for $5 a month. But now the better recording features, simpler menus, and superior search and recommendation technology are not the only things recommending the Tivo. Now TiVo lets you download content from Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand, which makes it a vastly superior value proposition. It can also handle podcasts, and your music and photos, making it a pretty good stand-in for a media server.
I used to recommend the higher end models, but I no longer think it's worth investing in them, because you can attach external hard drives to the TiVo to get extra storage space. (Warning--you can't use the external hard drive for anything else; TiVo formats it for its own use). That's a lot cheaper, and more flexible, than buying a pricier TiVo.
I do recommend, unless your television happens to sit next to your ethernet, investing in a TiVo wireless adapter, which will let you hook it into the wireless network.
All TiVos now let you use cable cards, giving you dual tuner capability--you can watch on one channel, and record on another. You can also transfer content between TiVos, which I dream of doing when I finally become a two-TiVo family.
6. Kindle Still love it. The machine is expensive, but the books are cheap--and they no longer threaten to crowd me out of house and home. Seriously, I've probably saved the cost of the Kindle in forgone paper books and new bookshelves to hold them. And for travelling, there's nothing like it. If you, like me, are used to hauling around a huge pile of books on vacation, this will save your back, your temper, and your excess baggage charges. It's also great for people like my mother, who's on a so-far unrequited quest for the perfect reading glasses.
7. iPhone Yup, it's great. I never knew before that I wanted to read my Google reader in taxicabs and get my email on the train. But I do. It's also a good enough phone that my mother, who is technophobic, got one.
Two weird things that might hold you back (besides the price): My mother's fingertips tend to be very cold, an artifact of all the chemicals she used to refinish our house. It took her a while to get the hang of making the screen work, so if you have diabetes or something, it might not be a good phone for you. Also, it's delicate. Both my mother, and Peter Suderman, with whom I waited in line for the phone, managed to break theirs pretty early into their ownership.
If you do get one, a couple of recommendations: buy AppleCare, and a good case. I have the Griffin Wave, but there are a ton of great cases out there.
8. Shure noise cancelling headphones Anyone who flies frequently, or commutes by train, shouldn't be without these. They have three advantages over those famous ones sole by Bose:
1) They're smaller, which means that you can sleep in them, and also that no one will mistake you for an air traffic controller trying to land cargo planes in World War Two Borneo. Also, a lot easier to carry--you'll use these for every day.
2) They're several hundred dollars cheaper.
3) They work better. Rather than using white noise, these block your ear canals so sound can't get in. It takes a while to get used to the sensation, but after you do, they not only give you better sound quality, but also actually protect your hearing from excessively loud noise.
For obvious reasons, do not wear these while driving or riding a bike.
9. Olympus digital voice recorder This is a gift for people who use a PC. It is not a sexy gift, to be sure, but for a journalist, a good voice recorder is indispensible. This one delivers really sterling sound quality--I've recorded interviews in the middle of very crowded rooms, and gotten every word. Possibly the best feature is that the device itself is a USB key that you just plug into your laptop, so there's no wondering where you put that cable
10. Logitech laptop headphones After more than a year, these are still indispensible. I use them not merely for Bloggingheads, but for nearly all my phone interviews; a $14.95 plug-in for Skype allows me to record my phone calls without expensive equipment. They're also extremely good, and comfortable, headphones. And they're designed to work either with or without USB (there's a little adapter) which makes it easy to switch computers, or plug them into my iPod, as I've done more than once.
11. Western Digital Passport drive Bigger than a USB key, smaller than a massive external, this is what I travel with for backups. If you're lazy about backups, you should have one of these in your laptop bag, making it easy to back up on a whim. It's easy to use, good looking, and most importantly, it fits neatly into a laptop pocket. I also found it useful when my music maxed out the hard drive of my laptop; I just moved it to the external drive.
12. Western Digital One Terabyte external drive Now that they're less than $150, every family should have one for centralized backups; your pictures are worth more to you than a couple of shifts at McDonalds. You can also use one to expand your TiVo's capacity, much more cheaply (and more storage) than buying a bigger TiVo. Or turn an old computer into a media server attached to your television, with the drive holding music and movies.
13. Verizon wireless modem
This is a deductible business expense for me, but I highly recommend this for anyone who moves around a lot. It's taken the place of expensive wireless purchases at airports and Starbucks. I work on the train, in libraries with no wireless--basically anywhere I can get a cell phone connection. While I get my cell phone with AT&T, I'm still loyal to Verizon's superior network for my data card.14. Logitech Harmony Universal Remote If you are going to have a TiVo, a Blu-Ray player, perhaps a decent stereo, you are going to need a universal remote, or a prescription for powerful antipsychotics. This is the mid-range model, and I'm on my second one (the first having been tragically crushed in the Flight From New York). The setup is slightly tedious, but once you've set up your activities (watching movies, listening to music on the media server, etc), it vastly simplifies your life--you can even control the lights with it, if you have the right sort of dimmer. I particularly like this one because it's rechargeable. The only downside is that I now can't cannibalize its batteries in extremis.
15. Sony Cybershot H3 This is the camera I bought two years ago for some professional work; it's still plugging along. It takes beautiful amateur photos with a variety of settings that are pretty easy to use. Most importantly (to me) it has a 10X optical zoom, which gives you a great deal more flexibility than most point-and-shoots. It's elderly now, and I'm sure has been replaced by something even snazzier. But frankly, at this point, the upward ratchets in megapixels are counterproductive for most amateurs--what you gain in pixelation, you lose in the fussiness of the picture-taking requirements. (Among other things, the more pixelation, the more exacting the lighting requirements). I'm hard put to think of a feature this doesn't have that I'd want.
16. iPod connector cables I find these much more useful than a sound dock--you can connect your iPod to any stereo, rather than spending extra to get a connection to just one, usually inferior, system. These cables also let you connect any iPod with video capability to your television, and power up at the same time with the attached USB jack. I use mine all the time, and take them with me when I travel.
17. Brother Multifunction Printer I cannot overstate how great it is, in a multi-computer house, to have a multifunction printer with built-in networking. The biggest problem is that I am now the most popular person among my circle of friends and family, as everyone stops by to do a little printing, a little faxing, and drink my coffee. Luckily, I am very social, and have a big coffeemaker.
A note from the housemate, who is, er, a little obsessive about electronics right now: the best time to buy a television will apparently be next weekend, when most videophiles think the LCD market will bottom with the pre-Christmas sales. Manufacturers overproduced in August for a Christmas season that has turned out to be considerably less merry than expected. So if you're going to buy a flat panel, wait a week. I know you may want it under the tree, but a picture will be nearly as magical.
If you are going to spend that much money for a Bluray player, why not just get a Playstation 3? Video quality is comparable to standalone players, and it is also possible to buy videos (although unlike Microsoft's game console, it doesn't offer Netflix downloads; but your TiVo will take care of that, anyway). It's also a topnotch upscaling player for regular DVDs, and will play streamed video and music from your PC. And maybe there will even be a game or two worth buying.
Only real caveat--the remote is bluetooth, which is radio frequency, not infrared, so if you want it to work with your Harmony remote (indispensable for even a moderately complex system) you'll need to buy a separate box to translate RF to infrared.
Personally, I like the low-end Harmony remotes that sell for $100, or less if you shop around. They all do the same thing. You don't get the color screen (but who spends much time looking at the screen on the remote?), and it's not rechargeable, but separate rechargeable batteries and a charger are not expensive and more widely useful.
1. Wii Yes, it really is that great.
No, it's really not. At least not for anyone who actually likes video games.
The graphics are trash, the peripherals are gimmicks at best, it doesn't support any HD mode, and the best games of the past 3 years will never come out for it.
That's the biggest weakness, in my opinion - the serious games, the ones with revolutionary storytelling and gameplay, will never ever be out for the Wii because the platform simply can't run them. Get a Wii for the non-gamers in your life, but if you know somebody who is actually interested in video games, pick up an Xbox 360 Arcade (which you can often find discounted from its regular price of $199.) After a few hours of Bioshock, Fallout 3, and GTA IV, they'll thank you.
8. Shure noise cancelling headphones
They don't work better. Isolating the ear canal doesn't count as "noise cancelling", for one, and the noise reduction effect is only as good as the little silicone gasket that seals off your ear canal.
Which makes them deeply uncomfortable for long listening for most people, plus there's the problem of how gross the gasket gets as it collects all your earwax.
Active noise cancellation technology doesn't use "white noise", it actually cancels out ambient noise with an out-of-phase rebroadcast. As a result it's highly effective at suppressing droning-type sounds that simple ear canal isolation can't muffle. And they don't have to cost hundreds of dollars. My JVC HA-NC100's fold up, have a retracting cord, cancel out basically anything but human speech, and were less than $40 on Amazon. The sound quality is crystal-clear, lightyears better than anything I've ever put in my ear, and they're comfortable as hell because of the circumaural design. Plus they double as earmuffs when its cold.
As a Kindle advocate, I'd add that one of its most useful functions is the ability to read longish pdfs and docs. So much easier than scrolling on a computer screen -- my eyes take in the text more quickly and I concentrate better -- and much more portable than your laptop. And much more convenient than printing the things out, even if you have a nifty multifunction printer like Megan. Just email the file to yourself at your Amazon/Kindle address and Amazon immediately converts the file and downloads it instantly to your Kindle. Price is 10 cents a file. There's also a freebie service someone offers.
All the free ebooks on the web can also be emailed to yourself (html, txt) for conversion and downloading.
Warning on the Kindle right now as a holiday gift -- it's out of stock. Not clear whether when it becomes available again (Feb?) if it will be the original or a 2.0 version with (hopefully) improved ergonomics. Also hopefully any functional improvements Amazon makes in the future -- e.g. to the "experimental" web browser -- will just be software upgrades that aren't machine-version-dependent. Upgrades are automatically downloaded and installed to your Kindle.
Will a "Holiday Gift Guide: Books Edition" be forthcoming shortly? I hope so. Your colleague wrote about books more generally, but specific advice would be much appreciated.
Noise cancellation and noise isolation are complementary. Noise isolation can block out higher frequency noises, but effectiveness drops off for lower frequencies. Noise cancellation works best at lower frequencies for constant noise--they usually don't attempt to cancel noise which appears and disappears quickly or is continually changing in character. This is why noise cancellation works well for jet engines and your computer fans, but not so well for your coworker chattering on the phone in the next cubicle.
There's a reason why the Wii has consistently outsold the other two consoles, and it's not solely a matter of price--and I speak as a video game enthusiast who has all 3 consoles. No, it's not the system (or at least not the first system) to get for a game fan. But I've been at a party where a crowd of suburban forty-somethings of both sexes were enthusiastically playing Wii bowling. You simply do not encounter that with any other game console.
No, its not HD, but its got wide-screen interlaced ED, and for most medium-sized TVs, that's plenty good enough, especially for the cartoon-style games that the Wii favors.
A word of warning that the Shure earphones are not for everyone. I spend a lot of time wearing earplugs for recreational and competitive shooting, yet I find the Shures unusably uncomfortable. At least on the model that I have (e2c maybe?), and for the dimensions of my ears, the part that goes into your ear is too thick and too short to easily and repeatably get where it needs to be for a tight, comfortable seal.
But I've been at a party where a crowd of suburban forty-somethings of both sexes were enthusiastically playing Wii bowling. You simply do not encounter that with any other game console.
It's called "Rock Band", and it's for all three consoles. And, sure. The Wii is good for party games. But that's about all there is - two dozen copycat party games, a dozen copycat minigame-games, but nothing to really sit down and play. For $300 + $150 in extra controllers, it's too expensive to just be a party favor.
Another thing my Xbox does - streams NetFlix movies on my TV. What a relief not to have to crowd chairs in front of the computer in the corner for movie night.
The Wii is a great party tool. Even my small groups of friends, where the men want to play games and the women don't, everyone plays the Wii. My grandparents like to play the Wii. Lions lay down with lambs...cats and dogs sleeping together.....
How many of these items will be found under the trees in auto line assembly workers' homes next week? Or, how many of those homes would Megan say should have them?
Didn't Megan write an anti-Holiday gifts post, like, this past week?
Are you some kind of monster, Megan?
An engineer commented a couple of months ago about an electronic component design set for kids which he thought was useful. I can't find it going through archives; any hints on what it was? It would be nice if we could go through the blog and comments like one can in 'Look inside this book' on Amazon with a word search function.
The Wii is great for anyone not really into video games, like the author of this blog. But after a few months the novelty will wear off for just about anyone. And it can't even play DVDs.
What's wrong with you, Megan? You felt that, in the middle of an unfolding economic crisis, it was justified to use your ersatz economics blog to write about the thousands of dollars' worth of electronics in your house?
Do you and your friends and family routinely exchange gifts costing hundreds of dollars? Who even puts a $2,000 TV in a gift guide? Are you that out of touch?
Do you not see the irony in writing a post decrying the commercialization of Christmas and another basically pleading poverty and then following that up with lists pitching $200 kitchen knives?
The Atlantic is dead.
If you are really serious about wanting to back stuff up, I would skip the Western Digital USB drive and go for something like the Lacie 2Big Nas. It has two hard drives and can be set up as a RAID, so if one drive fails the other still has your data. It also has ethernet, which means you can keep all your data on one drive and access it from multiple computers over your network.
Sure, it's expensive, but after having several external drives fail on me, and losing all my data, it's worth it. I have the "My Documents" folder on my main PC mapped to mine.
The time to buy the TV is the week after Christmas. Buy a floor model. Better yet, a "damaged" floor model where the damage is a missing remote. I got a Sharp Aquos 42-Inch LCD last year for $500. No remote, but I got a Harmony remote. Also on sale. Including cables it was $600.
Oddly enough, the Apple store had the best prices on HDMI cables. $20 for a 6 foot cable.
Wow, this new media age is really exciting—any moron can write a holiday electronics gift guide just by cataloging all the crap she and her housemate have accumulated over the past two years. Whoo-frickin'-hoo!
You'd think that the executives at a highly sophisticated company like Amazon would have had the sense to avoid running out of Kindles for the Christmas shopping season.
Forget the Kindle.
Buy Used Books. They are cheap, you can buy them at a local shop and online, and then you can resell them (usually at the shop you bought them at) and buy more. This way they don't pile up in your house, either. You will be saving the environment too.
How many of these items will be found under the trees in auto line assembly workers' homes next week? Or, how many of those homes would Megan say should have them?
Didn't Megan write an anti-Holiday gifts post, like, this past week?
Are you some kind of monster, Megan?
Posted by Mike | December 14, 2008 5:29 PM
Mike,
she's a Pro-State psuedo-'libertarian', IOW: of course, she's a monster.
~~
What's wrong with you, Megan? You felt that, in the middle of an unfolding economic crisis, it was justified to use your ersatz economics blog to write about the thousands of dollars' worth of electronics in your house?
Do you and your friends and family routinely exchange gifts costing hundreds of dollars? Who even puts a $2,000 TV in a gift guide? Are you that out of touch?
Do you not see the irony in writing a post decrying the commercialization of Christmas and another basically pleading poverty and then following that up with lists pitching $200 kitchen knives?
The Atlantic is dead.
Posted by D Johnston | December 14, 2008 9:36 PM
D Johnston,
The Atlantic has long been Dead. w/MM aboard, the ATLantic, surely, sails on..
~~
Wow, this new media age is really exciting—any moron can write a holiday electronics gift guide just by cataloging all the crap she and her housemate have accumulated over the past two years. Whoo-frickin'-hoo!
Posted by Glenn Kenny | December 14, 2008 10:44 PM
Glenn,
if you sold your 'Honor', as MM has, so cheaply, you, too, would try to console yourself by cataloging the trinkets you, gladly, took in exchange..
~~
and, as others, including:
Forget the Kindle.
Buy Used Books. They are cheap, you can buy them at a local shop and online, and then you can resell them (usually at the shop you bought them at) and buy more. This way they don't pile up in your house, either. You will be saving the environment too.
Posted by lebecka | December 14, 2008 11:12 PM
easily point out, the simple Truth is of no acquaintance to our blog-hostess..
the one thinks that GOOG and 'Don'tbe evil' reflect Reality, rather than PR..
http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=web&q=Google+Chinese+Police+State
Past all that, MM, here's hoping that, one of these days, you'll remember the, meta-physical, definition of 'backbone', for it, as an added benefit, will straighten your Spine, as well as your Cognition.
For all your cables, go to monoprice.com or somewhere similar - do not buy the Monster or other crap.
"Shure noise cancelling headphones" accelerated my hearing loss.
"The only good thing that I can possibly think of about this financial crisis is that it may break the rat race of constantly ratcheting consumption, which has surrounded most Americans with nice things that don't really make them happy. There's absolutely nothing wrong with buying whatever you want, when you have the money to afford it. But when you start thinking that you need toys and television sets to have a happy life, we're all in trouble."
-Megan McArdle, 11/21/08
Nothing Megan said in these reviews contradicts her earlier column about materialism, where she did explicitly say, "there is nothing wrong with buying whatever you want."
It's good to strive for higher values than new toys on Christmas. It's also fun to get new toys on Christmas.
I do, however, agree with those who point out that the Wii is a video game console for people who don't like video game consoles. A Wii and a Blu-Ray player??? If you actually *like* video games, a PS-3 gets you a game console (where you could have been playing some of your favorites, like Okami and Rock Band, long before they were copied over to the Wii) which ALSO plays Blu-Ray disks.
Or, better still, and X-Box 360, which also has lots of great games and lets you download movies from NetFlix to your living room.
I'm going to pile on with the contradictions by saying if you want a BIG television, get a projector and a screen. I'm typing this post on a Mac mini connected to a projector, which lets me enjoy a desktop that is over 8 and a half feet wide and looks crystal clear! Later today, I'll be watching movies on the same screen and enjoy the full theater experience, minus the sticky floors and braying children. My projector cost me $1300, and has a lamp in it which needs to be replaced every couple years for $350. The tuner and Mac together, complete with extra memory and hard drive space, were less than $1000 and allow me to both watch and record free over-the-air HD, not to mention watching everything from movie downloads to Megan's appearances on bloggingheads. Even factoring in the surround sound system and the cost of remodeling around my system, it's quite a bargain compared to those puny 50" HDTVs, and much more fun!
No, it's really not. At least not for anyone who actually likes video games.
This reminds me of the people that criticized the Zelda game for the GC because it was too cartoony or kid like. There are a lot of really fun games, and Bioshock, GTA IV or Fallout 3 aren't what I'd call groundbreaking games. Don't get me wrong, they are amazing games but some of the Wii games are amazing as well. I also don't get the idea that a "serious" game makes it any better.
I do agree with you on noise-canceling headphones. I have a pair of the Bose ones, and they are amazing on long plane flights. I got them as a present, and I'm guessing there are cheaper options available. However, they make the time on a plane flight fly for me and I now realize just how loud a plane is.
The XBox 360 will result in a red ring of death within a year. It will take months for Microsoft to honor the warranty and repair it.
Be warned.
BTW, buying used books is not better for the environment then using the Amazon Kindle. Think about all that gas your burning driving back and forth from all the used book shops, OR buying them online and having them shipped to you on gas-burning UPS trucks.
Using the Kindle is far GREENER option!!
The XBox 360 will result in a red ring of death within a year.
It's true that a lot of people have had this problem, but only on the older hardware revisions.
The new Falcon and Jasper chipsets should be a lot more reliable. I've only had mine for a few months, but I've had no problems at all. And plenty of people used the older chipsets just fine with no problem. But there were a higher-than-normal number of hardware failures, that's true.
I don't know about "months to repair it", though. Maybe when there was a glut of failures all at once, but these days the turnaround is a lot faster.
Apparently, those of us who are still fortunate enough to be gainfully employed, and who are not too spooked by seeing our retirement accounts shed much of their value almost overnight, or by the bill for the various bailouts which will inevitably eventually become due, are nevertheless expected to wear sackcloth and ashes this Christmas out of sympathy for the autoworkers who have lost their jobs. Of course, that's hardly going to benefit segments of the economy that are dependent upon Christmas sales to stay afloat. But I guess the guys who are overflowing with sympathy for the endangered autoworkers who build SUVs don't have any left to spare for the guys who build and sell electronic toys.
@ Crusader-- You are wrong.
You have to charge the Kindle-- It does use electricity, you know, that is produced in filthy, smoke-belching coal-fired power plants. Used books however, do not require electricity to work.
Boo-frakin-hoo. Cry me a river.
Be careful with the Shure earplugs, They can aggravate tinnitus or cause hyperacusis.
But I guess the guys who are overflowing with sympathy for the endangered autoworkers who build SUVs don't have any left to spare for the guys who build and sell electronic toys.
I've got plenty of sympathy for anyone affected at this or any time of time of year by the economic downturn. That's why I question Megan's choice of two seemingly endless posts about all the great presents she and her friends will be buying each other this year. But whatever, it's her bog.
...besides which, is there any argument that giving autoworkers and as well as everyone else some sense of peace of mind about their jobs thru the holidays, even if it's explicitly temporary and ultimately illusory, won't help your electronics retailers in their crucial season?
It's like you think it's either help workers or help retailers through the holidays. I've got news, dude: it's both or neither.
However, trying to make people feel guilty for buying and giving Christmas gifts this season benefits nobody, unless you count the mean-spirited satisfaction reaped by the guy trying to spread the guilt.
Megan diddles while Rome burns...
Megan, strange as it is, somehow, I think you need to be reminded not to take a bath with these electronics. Call me crazy, but the only thing we want roasted on Christmas is the turkey.
I mean, the bird...