Saturday, February 1, 2014

What do you do with good, old "stuff?"

I recently visited the Apple Store on behalf of my daughter Courtney. Courtney has a MacBook laptop. She recently bought a protective cover for so that when she puts it in a backpack, it doesn't get smushed into MacBook fragments, parts or even apple dust. Her school recently changed its policy and now kids can bring laptops to school. Too bad she brought the wrong size and needed it exchanged. Somehow that became my wife's job. I was just along for the ride.

When we got to the store, I looked around to see what was new. I'm typically an early adopter of technology in work and in life. My family is generally early adopters as well but they are much more believers in the Gospel of Apple. My wife went to see if they had the right size cover (our primary mission) while I looked around.

In my recent travels, and they have been many, I noticed that since the airlines have relaxed their rules regarding on board electronics, more people seem to be traveling with ipods. Not iphones, ipads, or laptops but plain old ipods. I wanted to look at them to see what had changed since I was using them while training a long, long time ago. Since training is hopefully ramping up, I need one. The new ones looked cool and cost less that I expected but I realized I probably had old ones home so I didn't buy anything. Neither did my wife as they didn't have the right cover size so our trip was a fail.

I went home to look for my old stuff. I found 3 ipod shuffles, and old Iphone that has hundreds of songs loaded, 2 nano, and a couple of  ipod touches. I found no headphones. I had to search for power cords and adapters but found a few that worked. I tested the shuffles and found all powered on. The first one worked.

I got my day to day headphones and used the first while walked a bit outside this morning. It felt a little like real life deja vu  but everything, including my body, worked. A good sign.

I'm still collecting our remaining istuff to figure out which would be ijunk and which could be ifunctional. I haven't even started on old computers yet. We tried to donate old computers in the past and most charities don't want them. I know that some will take tablets (aka ipads) but don't know of any that want ipods.

At sometime I'll need to figure out when do I buy the new stuff. Until then, I'm good with this old stuff. Maybe I should keep track of what I'm not spending to rationalize spending it on something else. Perhaps some time to make these blog posts more frequent?

Yup, that'll work.






2 comments:

Ransick said...

If you can't find somewhere that will take your old stuff, you could see if there is a freecycle.org in your area. I've given away several things that still work.

Michael said...

I know Best Buy will buy old Ipods...to a point, I guess depends on how old yours are. You can actually go to their website and get an estimate if you know the generation.