Okay so it's almost Thanksgiving, which in my house means three days of pretending to care about football while actually just refreshing gadget blogs on my phone under the table. My mom caught me doing this last year and now introduces me to relatives as "the one who's always on his phone," which, fair, but also rude.
Anyway. Black Friday is a week and a half out and I've been building a list. Not a list I expect to actually buy everything on — I have a mortgage-adjacent rent situation and a car that makes a noise I'm ignoring — but a list nonetheless. Here's what's on it.
The Kindle Fire, obviously
It's been out for like a week now and everyone I know either already has one or is pretending they don't want one. $199 for a color tablet that does Netflix and Amazon Instant Video and reads my Kindle books is genuinely hard to argue with. I played with one at a friend's apartment on Saturday and the UI felt a little laggy honestly, some of the app switching had a stutter to it, but for two hundred bucks I don't think anyone's going to care that much. It's not an iPad. It was never trying to be an iPad. It's a Wi-Fi tablet that costs less than my last cell phone bill for two months, and I kind of respect Amazon for not pretending otherwise.
An actual reason to want a Galaxy Nexus
I'm an Android guy (long story, mostly involves being cheap and stubborn) and Ice Cream Sandwich has been rolling out on the Galaxy Nexus the last couple weeks and from what I've seen it actually looks like a real redesign, not just "here's the same OS with rounder icons." The on-screen buttons thing still weirds me out a little. No physical home button, but I'll reserve judgment till I've actually held one instead of watching someone else's hands-on video at 1am like some kind of gadget peeping tom.
Siri, but only because everyone at dinner will ask about it
My cousin got an iPhone 4S the week it came out in October and has not shut up about Siri since. Every family gathering now involves someone yelling "SIRI, WILL IT RAIN TOMORROW" across the living room like we're testing a smoke detector. I don't need one. I'm not switching platforms over a voice assistant that still can't understand my uncle's accent half the time, but I get why people like showing it off. It's a genuinely fun party trick even if the practical use case is "ask it something dumb in front of an audience."
Small tangent: this is the first holiday season without Steve Jobs actually being around for the launch cycle, and it's strange how much that's in the back of my head every time an Apple product comes up in conversation. Anyway.
Things I want that are not going to happen
A new laptop. I've been eyeing something to replace this three-year-old machine that takes ninety seconds just to wake from sleep, but I put Ubuntu 11.10 on it a few weeks back to hold me over and the new Unity interface has been fighting me the whole way. I keep losing track of which corner does what, and half the time I just want my old GNOME panel back. It's not that Unity is bad exactly, it's that relearning muscle memory on a machine I'm also trying to be productive on is miserable timing on my part. Anyway, no new laptop, the old one soldiers on.
A Windows 8 machine also isn't happening because, come on, it's still just a developer preview. I poked around it in a VM out of curiosity back in September and it's interesting but there's no way I'm buying hardware for an OS that isn't even finished baking.
The actual plan
Realistically I'll wake up stupidly early the day after Thanksgiving, stand in a parking lot with a coffee that's already gone cold, and come home with something I didn't put on this list at all. That's basically tradition at this point. Two years ago I went in for a router and came out with a rice cooker because the router was sold out and the rice cooker was 70% off and I panicked. My family still brings that up.
If the Kindle Fire's actually in stock somewhere near me though, that one's coming home. Everything else is just window shopping until my card statement tells me otherwise.