After reading a recent article posted on Yahoo Finance, I felt a rebuttal was in order. "10 things not to buy in 2010" states you should be avoiding gas guzzling cars, inefficient appliances, new text books, CDs, DVDs, land line phones, newspapers, pocket cameras, external hard drives, and any phone that isn't a BlackBerry or iPhone. Some of this is good advice and some of it is not. If you don't read any further than this, do yourself a favor and go out and buy an external hard drive RIGHT NOW.

Follow up:

Good advice includes buying a high MPG car or an efficient refrigerator, but you probably didn't need anyone to tell you that. Buying textbooks is always a waste of money and the days of hard bound texts is on the way to disappearing anyway. Ebooks and online resources, class outlines and notes are already available, and needing any of these presupposes that the student goes to class anyway.

Landline phones and newspapers are already dead. I cancelled my last newspaper last year and it wasn't because I didn't want to read it. It was because they kept jacking the price up all while making the paper smaller and smaller. I am old enough to still enjoy reading hard copy text, and to see the process of sitting down with a paper as one partly Zen and partly comfortable habit. Reading the paper takes a planned time investment, one where you are focused on the printed page, the story, and if multitasking enters the picture, it is in the form of taking a sip of coffee. In contrast to this fading method of waking your mind and body we have squinting at your Blackberry in one hand, your briefcase in the other, all while being jostled about on the train (or while driving, in some cases). Efficient? Absolutely. Enjoyable? Not at all.

Landline phones are gone because they served too limited a purpose. In a day when we all carry a phone with us, what exactly is the point of having one that you can only use while puttering about the house? Landline service sealed its fate when they forced so many extras into our bills that they rivalled cellular cost, with only a tiny fraction of the usefulness. Unlimited long distance!, caller ID!, calling plans!, line service charges! - none of this is new or remotely exciting and we weren't using any of it. If Ma Bell had gone the other route and stripped my landline to $9.99 a month, I might have kept it for emergencies. For $49.99 a month, forget it.

Now we get to the point where I take issue with the last 5 things "not" to buy. CDs? DVDs? Hard drives and cameras? And no Palm or Nokia smartphones? Let's break this down:

CDs and DVDs are an old technology for sure but they are technologies that suit the purpose just exactly as well as they will ever need to. Both are intended as a portable medium for data, music and video respectively. Buying a CD full of music or a DVD full of motion pictures also provides you with lifetime ownership (license) on a platter that will likely outlast your desire to play it. By contrast, downloaded or streamed content provides you with a transient experience. In the case of a streamed digital movie, your right to view it lasts only as long as it takes you to go from opening credit to closing credit. If you buy a digital movie or MP3 download, you also purchase a license to use that file (if you downloaded it legally). Sadly though, download formats have been until now mostly proprietary - music downloaded for your Zune was not compatible with an iPod and vice versa. And perhaps more importantly, that music file generally is only yours to use until your next computer crash. I know I don't want to download a 25 gigabyte music library again when I my current hard drive fails. You will never regret buying yourself a CD/DVD hardcopy because it is still yours every time you get a new computer or iPod. You can always rip your hardcopy back into whatever digital format you wish.

Digital downloads are only now becoming a reasonable means to acquire a library of music and video because proprietary formats are going away. But the need to make and manage a backup of your paid for content becomes critical and that brings us to external hard drives. Don't buy them? Hogwash! External hard drives are available right now with no format issues between computing platforms; one fits all. They are dirt cheap and so simple to use that your children can do it without instructions. All of your music and digital photos you've taken (with the compact digital camera you are apparently not supposed to buy) will fit easily on these drives allowing you to share them across computers, carry them from work to home, or take them to grandma's for a slideshow on Sunday.

Send it all to the 'Cloud' the article says. Why should you pay to rent storage space on someone else's server when you can have it all in a pocketable external drive? Let's look at the numbers: $50 a year for some Cloud space is the least you will pay to store your data. Apple's MobileMe service runs $100 a year. For $100 you can own one terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of space on a USB hard drive. What if that external drive fails? Replace it. Drive failure rates are not 50% per year; drives are rated for failure by hours of operation with the average being on order of 500,000 hours. Portable drives generally see less use than the drive in your laptop, so that 500,000 hours will get you more than 57 years of storage pleasure. Ok, what if my house burns down? Well for me, my external drive would be the first thing I grab on the way out the door but let's be honest... if you're planning for things like house fires you probably should buy a second external drive and keep it in the safe deposit box, just in case.

Now we've got digital cameras and BlackBerries to discuss. In some cases, your digital camera is your smartphone, but let's ignore that for a minute. Digital cameras are never going to be replaced by bulky digital SLRs. I am thrilled that I can take a decent photo now without having to lug around a device so large it required a separate carrying case with a shoulder strap. 10 megapixels... 12 megapixels... $99 pocket cameras are just as good as the old 35mm cameras we used to carry and a heck of a lot easier to use. I have been from Toledo, Spain to Toledo, Ohio and not once did I stop and regret the loss of my old camera bag. Digital SLRs are a niche market catering to people that want multiple lenses, filters, flashes and accessories. They are exactly for that person that wants to carry a shoulder bag with a camera. Just not for me.

So what about the last point - buy only iPhones and BlackBerries? You know what she's saying - buy your phone for the app store, not for what the phone does. Apps are great, you'll get no argument from me. I downloaded a racing game for my iPhone and I love it. But even if smartphones are minicomputers in our pockets, they serve just a few essential purposes which they ALL do, and do well: voice communication, internet and email, calendar, scheduling, and contact management. That was why you bought a smartphone, right? Or was it for that racing game? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Phones, iPods, cameras, computers, GPSs, and PDAs all are ephemeral. They last for a couple years and they become antiquated. They are also all converging into one device, so there is still a tremendous amount of angst and flux left to endure. If you had bought the top of the line Palm Pilot in 1996, no matter how many bells and whistles it may have had you still replaced it a few years later. Your $500 BlackBerry is exactly the same: easily discarded and replaced. Palm released their first handheld device in 1996. BlackBerry's first smartphone was released in 2002, and the iPhone in 2007, and Google released their smartphone in 2010 (or was it 2011?). Buy your smartphone because it does what you need it to, and get a service contract with a carrier that has good coverage and bandwidth where you live. I promise, you'll forget about that racing game app in no time.