I hate Black Friday, and I don’t even understand what Cyber Monday is supposed to be. So I waited until both were over to write a Technologizer column for TIME.com on how to get great deals on tech products this holiday season.
Tag Archives | Shopping
The Return of the Sears Catalog–Thanks to Ancestry.com
If you want to know what American life was like during the 20th century, there are two essential resources: LIFE magazine and the Sears Roebuck catalog. Google Books put the entire run of LIFE on the Web last year. And now genealogical megasite Ancestry.com has digitized more than 250,000 pages of Sears catalogs, from 1896 through the sad demise of the once-mighty American institution in 1993.
The catalogs are at www.ancestry.com/sears and can be browsed and searched, but unlike Google’s LIFE archive, they’re not yours to explore for free: The contents are available to Ancestry subscribers, who pay from $19.95 a month for “US Deluxe Membership” to $299.40 a year for “World Deluxe Membership.” If you’re into genealogical research, your subscription gets you vast amounts of important data: government records of all sorts, yearbooks, historic newspapers, and more. I don’t begrudge Ancestry the fee it charges for its useful services, but I’m sorry that this fascinating material isn’t as readily available as the LIFEs. (Maybe the company should introduce a day-pass option.)
Of course, If you’re as interested in this kind of stuff as I am, you can sign up for a two-week free trial membership, then gorge on the Sears material. Which is what I did, and what I plan to do.
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Buy an iPad, Save $100
Want a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad? Get yourself to TJ Maxx.
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TiVo’s New Pricing: Both Cheaper and Pricier–and Definitely More Confusing
TiVo, the original personal TV box, is facing new competition from Apple TV, Roku, the Boxee Box, Logitech’s Google-based Revue, and other Johhnie-come-lately gizmos. Most of them cost less than TiVo, and none of them require a monthly fee. And the company is responding with a holiday offer–good through December 31st–that brings the price of a TiVo box from $299.99 down to $99.99, the same amount you’d pay for an Apple TV or Roku’s midrange version. It’s calling this an “instant savings” of $200. And there’s even an option to pay nothing up-front at all.
Except…it’s nowhere as simple as that. Actually, figuring out how much TiVo costs, and which version to buy, just got more confusing.
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Got Any Questions for Zappos' Tony Hsieh?
I’m not a customer of shoe/fashion/housewares superstore Zappos, but I’ve never met anyone who was and didn’t rave about the site. So I’m pleased to have been invited to guest-tweet a live Webcast with Zappos founder/CEO Tony Hsieh this Friday, September 24, at 2pm PT. I’ll watch, listen, and tweet some thoughts as I do.
The topic of the Webcast is “Service and the Evolution of the New Customer,” and I doubt that there’s a merchant on the Web who knows more about the subject than Hsieh. (He recently wrote a New York Times bestseller about it.)
You can participate (and share your own questions and impressions via Twitter) by joining us here on Friday. In the meantime, if you’ve got any questions for Hsieh, feel free to share them as a comment on this post–we’ll round ’em up for the Webcast.
(Full disclosure: Like other Webcasts I’ve observed and tweeted, this one is sponsored by HP and hosted at one of its sites. The hashtag for the event is #hpio.)
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The Credit Card as Gizmo
People are always talking about credit-card-sized gadgets–remember Xircom’s REX PDA? Here at DEMO, however, a startup called Dynamics is showing credit-card-sized gizmos that really are credit cards.
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Microsoft's Latest PC-Mac Comparison is…Almost Reasonable
For years, Microsoft’s marketing efforts for Windows ignored the fact that Macs existed. That changed last year. In the wake of rising sales for Apple’s computers, Microsoft went on the offensive. But the case it made for Windows PCs and against the Mac was touchy and evasive. It ran PC ads that knocked Macs as overpriced but couldn’t find anything nice to say about Windows. It got pointlessly insulting about Mac users. And it commissioned a white paper on the “Apple tax” that was rife with fuzzy math and bizarre errors.
All that stuff happened in the late, not-at-all-lamented Windows Vista era. Back then, you could understand why Microsoft would be crabby about the whole subject of Windows vs. Mac–especially since Apple was repeatedly sucker-punching Vista in the face, via the meanest ads ever in its long-running “Get a Mac” campaign.
Today, however, is a new day. Vista has been replaced by the vastly superior Windows 7. Apple seems to have ditched the “Get a Mac” campaign in favor of a much lower-key, lower-profile Mac/PC comparison section on its site. And now Microsoft has responded in kind with a “Deciding Between a PC and a Mac” section on the Windows 7 site.
As with much of Microsoft’s consumer marketing for Windows, this new comparison is aimed at teeming masses of folks who don’t know a whole lot about computers, not geeks and enthusiasts. It clearly strives to come off as calm and reasoned, not snarky and emotional. There’s as much boosting of Windows as there is knocking of the Mac, and the whole thing is free of name-calling.
Let’s look at Microsoft’s claims, section by section. I understand that Microsoft isn’t going to make a balanced comparison of pros and cons here; you won’t hear about the hassle of dealing with Windows security, or the fact that few PCs come standard with creativity software to rival the iLife suite that’s bundled with every Mac. But checking out Microsoft’s case for Windows in the age of Windows 7 is a worthwhile exercise. And it’s reasonable to expect that even marketing copy should contain no gross mischaracterizations or factual errors, right?
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Buy.com's New Return Policy is Ridiculous! In a Good Way!
I’m used to most revisions to retailer return policies being bad news: shorter periods, more exceptions, heftier restocking fees. But Buy.com has just extended the period during which you can return most of the items you buy to an amazing forty-five days. I hope it sets off a return-policy war among e-retailers. (Amazon.com’s standard period is thirty days, and many merchants stick you with shorter periods and/or a gaggle of gotchas.)
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Best Buy's No-Rebate Droid X
Thank you, Best Buy, for selling a $199.99 (w/contract) phone for $199.99–no rebate paperwork or gift card involved.
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Initial Random Thoughts on the iPhone 4
I’ve had an iPhone 4 for around eight hours now, and have come to the conclusion that writing anything that reads like a review would be premature at this point. Too much of what’s important–video and photo quality, performance, battery life, and more–is dangeous to judge based on first impressions. (And multitasking, one of the key new features, might take weeks to get a grip on–I want to try multitasking-enabled versions of all my favorite apps.)
Herewith, some disorganized first impressions from my time with the phone so far:
- The guy who sold me my phone at the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco, Gabriel, was the same dude who I bought an iPhone 3GS from last year–and he instantly remembered me and greeted me like an old pal. (No, I don’t think he knew I’m a blogger.) My favorite Apple Store moment ever; a great retail experience, period.
- One of the major pieces of news so far involves apparent mysterious dropped calls if you touch the bottom left-hand corner of the phone. As a southpaw, I was rattled by the prospect–but I’ve tried repeatedly to intentionally trigger the issue, and have failed.
- I also don’t see any yellow spots on the screen. (Worst product-quality problem I’ve noticed to date: The protective plastic on the phone’s front and back was weirdly greasy and grubby. as if someone at Foxconn was eating Junior Mints while working the assembly line.)