Brian Lam

• A Macbook Pro 13-Inch, with 4GB of RAM, and the smallest HDD possible. I”d fit it with an aftermarket SSD drive at 256GB, later.
• An iPhone 3GS
• A Go Pro Hero Wide Helmet Camera, with surfboard, chest and suction cup mounts. (The 3m mounts fall off when you get gnarly.) Soon available in HD.
• A Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1 rugged and waterproof camera; or a Pentax W80 camera. Probably the Panasonic
• An Apple Time Capsule (2TB) for backing up and solid wireless conductivity with decent range and discreet N and B/G radios.

Here’s my supplementary list.

• A Nikon D700 for a DSLR; The Canon 5D Mark II for a DSLR that shoots video. (But I’d rather wait on a D700 variant with video or the D300s (sample video). I prefer Nikon Menus and Nikon low light color. And although the Canon glass can be argued hard for, the Canon video controls kind of suck.)
• A Ricoh or Lumix point and shoot. Or a Canon Powershot S90 point and shoot with the same sensor as the G11.
• A Red Scarlet camcorder, which I’ve never used and have no idea how it performs, actually.
• Or for $180, a 1080p Kodak Zi8 pocket camcorder.
• A 24-Inch Apple Cinema Display or the Dell equivalent at the time with video inputs.
• A Dell mini 10v Netbook, Hackintosh’d .
• Sony XBR8 Tri color LED backlit LCD HDTV. 40-something inches. If I were rich. There are better plasmas out, but I prefer the energy conservation afforded by LEDs.
• If not, a Samsung backlit LED LCD (NOT SIDELIT) HDTV. Even last gen. Screw the widgets in the newer sets; useless.
• TiVo HD
• Xbox 360 for games, media streaming, movie buying and Netflix.
• A netflix, iTunes, and Amazon Prime accounts. Bittorrent for easy access to the movies on open formats, while paying for that content using the stores above. (I think its ok to see netflix streaming or disc versions of movies, and instead of getting them via your netflix account, just torrent them. You have the right, anyhow.)
• A Kindle 2 (not DX). Ebooks make me read faster.
• Yamaha Surround soundbar, but only if they make these things shorter so they fit underneath the profile of table mounted HDTVs.

That’s really all you need to know about what gadgets to buy. You’ll be able to keep all of these things for a long time and be pretty happy with them.

*Updated August 24th, 2009. I am tempted to put amazon affiliate links on this page, but that would be a bit of a conflict of interest now, wouldn’t it?