C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Hardware Break

Well, we’ve gone through about half the software we want to mention. I’m going to take a little break and talk about my favorite (Mac compatible) hardware purchases this year. I didn’t get an iPhone. I live in what can only be referred to as a cellularly-challenged part of Minnesota. I can drive half an hour and buy an iPhone, but if I take it home with me it magically becomes an iPod Touch. Cool trick, but expensive. So, once my 5th Gen iPod gets good and scratched up I’ll just get a Touch… but for now, there are better ways to blow what money I have:

Hardware

The Logitech Dinovo Edge Bluetooth Keyboard, so nice I bought it twice. I got so used to it’s gorgeous looks and superb tactile experience at my home office, and then was always sorely disappointed to return to a “normal” keyboard at work. So I got one there, too. Great battery life, trackpad and light up funciton keys. The volume slider is a touch sensitive strip on the black plexiglass surface with LEDs that follow your finger. Audio feedback on the Caps Lock key is great when typing late at night and dealing with tired pinky fingers not going where you want them to. Downside would be that, true to form, Logitech created amazing hardware and the worst imaginable software. If you should happen to even think about installing the Logitech Control Center, your mac will crash. Leopard actually does fine with it, and with multiple keyboard bindings in the preferences, switching from home to mobile to office is no sweat.

From Logitech
Price $199.99

The keyboard, of course, looks silly without a wicked cool mouse. Logitech to the rescue again with the Logitech MX Revolution. If you add up all of the buttons and scroll wheels, you’ve got 13 individual actions, not counting additional combinations. A little help from SteerMouse allows the use of every last one, with different configurations on a per-program basis. It’s precise, smooth, and the buttons are very well placed, at least for me.

From Logitech
Price: $99

The Blue Snowball Microphone ended up in my collection because of its odd, slightly vintage looks. But it turned out to be the best $99 microphone I’ve ever used, beating out a streak of $3-400 mics I’ve been through in my life. Speaking, singing, guitar, drums, ambience (it has cardiod, -10dB PAD cardiod and omni options) all come through crystal clear on a USB channel. I recently gave it some love and purchased a studio arm for it, so now it can scissor up and out of the way, swinging down when I’m ready to say… “catch you on the flip side.”

From Blue Microphones
Price: $99

The Guardian Maximus Hard Drive was a purchase made during the replacement of a laptop hard drive, mostly because I realized that my life could be so much easier. Up to a Terabyte of storage in a dual-drive RAID-1 configuration (mirrored) provides a user-configurable backup solution. A Firewire 800 port and my own choice of higher-end SATA drives gives it the speed to fly through Time Machine backups and even pull of a full SuperDuper! backup in half the time it used to take me. And I can be fairly certain it will never fail, given that it’s writing everything to two different drives at the same time. Peace of mind, and I got my 250G version for about $1/gig (actual storage, total storage would be under .50/gig).

From NewerTech
Price: $149 (and up)