a drop of water

Apple computers are gaining market share on college campuses like crazy.  With their in store support (Genius Bar), optional (but well worth the money) 3 year warranty upgrade, their default suite of software productivity solutions, and their strategic marketing, Apple is poised to jump into the mainstream market share as the current collegiate-apple-fan graduates and becomes the majority of the technological work force.

Apple has made its product releases “events” that are cultishly followed by live feed and wildly rumored about on fan websites.  The interesting part is that once their new products are released, the older generation of products are substantially marked down, creating bargain deals for those who are at peace with the reality that 1st gen products typically have bugs and issues, while the tried and true nth gen products of the outdated product line are stable and dependable.

Here is an example:

Previous generation: Apple MacBook Pro MB133LL/A 15.4-inch Laptop (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD SuperDrive on Amazon for $1444 (After Rebate [AR]) when just a week ago, it was around $1999.

Now, obviously if you were to buy this, then you wouldn’t have the newest and the best and the fastest and the shiniest, but you are also stretching your dollar by buying the previous product model.  What I mean is, let’s say you sell this laptop a year from now for $1000.  This would mean you “rented” this laptop for $444.  On the other hand, if you were to buy the newst model Macbook Pro, you would pay something around $2100 (retail in CA for the “low” end MBP barring any discounts), and probably sell it for $1300, resulting in a “rental fee” of $700.  As much as I like to have the newest model with all the fancyness, I must remind myself that waiting usually pays off.

To start off, you will need to RSS feed reader (I use reader.google.com – which I will refer to in the following examples).  If you haven’t used reader.google.com, simply visit the site and set up an account if you do not have one already (i.e. gmail account).  Next, go to craigslist and do a search for the desired item.  Example: searching for nintendo wii (link: http://sandiego.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nintendo%20wii)

At the bottom of the page you will notice an orange RSS button.  Clicking that link will send you here (link: http://sandiego.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nintendo%20wii&format=rss) which should (at least it does for me) send you to a google page prompting you to add the RSS feed to your google homepage or your google reader.  Once added to your google reader, you are subscribed to this RSS feed and new posts on craigslist that match your search criteria will show up on your google reader page under the subscription.  Google reader will also allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds directly if you have a valid url.

I use google reader to track blogs (wordpress, blogspot, xanga, etc), ebay search rss feeds, craigslist rss feeds, and favorite sites like www.lifehacker.com).  RSS readers help you monitor the information overload that is the internet and in this posts specific focus, helps you manage searching for that exact item on craigslist (or ebay – the rss link is towards the bottom of the page on any search as well) that you’ve been looking for without having to revisit websites, type the same searches, and rescan all the old results.

Also a side tip, when searching on craigslist it is often helpful to narrow your search results by using “negative searching.”  If I wanted to search for a nintendo wii, but am only interested in new systems, I would type “nintendo wii -used” into the search box and only posted items with the words nintendo, wii and not the word used would be returned.

Here is a lifehacker post about the best RSS readers.

Here is craigslist page and the ebay page bout RSS.