Black Friday Sale, New Tech (Premium)

I’d been waiting on Google’s Black Friday sale to pull the trigger on two personal technology upgrades, one long overdue. Well, that sale is live now. And I’ve made two major purchases. And in each case, I have no idea how much I’m paying.

I know.

But first, if you are in the market for a 2022 Google Pixel, this is the time to buy: the Pixel 6a is just $299, an incredible $150 off its already reasonable $449 street price. The Pixel 7, meanwhile, is just $499, a savings of $100. And the Pixel 7 Pro is $150 with a starting price of just $749. These are all incredible prices, period, and Google was already winning the price comparison with Samsung and Apple. (Whether it wins in other categories is open to debate, of course. But when you’re the underdog, competing on price is job one.)

With that out of the way, this has been an annus horribilis for my wife and me from a financial perspective thanks to our unexpected purchase of a Mexico City apartment, the many times we then flew there this year, all of the furniture and other stuff we needed to buy for it, and other related costs, and the subsequent interest rate spike that literally doubled our monthly equity line payment. I won’t bore you with all that too much, but long story short, my discretionary spending abilities have nosedived in 2022 and I can’t just go buy expensive new things on a whim.

But there are certain … needs that have come up. OK, needs is a strong word, actually. But I’ll just frame these as time-based personal technology decisions. It will make sense in a moment.

The first is our home wi-fi. When we decided to move to Pennsylvania in 2017, I researched what I’d need to do to fill this humongous home with Wi-Fi, and I ended up getting a Google Wifi mesh network system with three nodes (that I later upgraded to four nodes because, again, humongous house). I’ve been very happy with it overall, but over the past year, I’ve noticed some connectivity issues from time to time and have had to unplug the main mode from power to cycle it to get things back to normal. (I have also had issues with the Sonos gear in the sunroom, which resulted in the fourth node purchase and a Sonos Boost wireless extender that finally solved the reliability problems.) Plus, the Google Wifi system is based on Wi-Fi 5, which is now two major generations old. It’s been five years and it’s time for an upgrade.

When I first started researching this in late summer, Google was expected to soon announce something based on Wi-Fi 6E, the latest Wi-Fi standard, and a dramatic improvement over both Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 from performance, reliability, and bandwidth/(lack of) interference perspectives. What I call a future-proof choice. Not because Wi-Fi 7 isn’t right around the corner, of course it is, but because it should have a similar usable life to the Google Wifi system I perhaps kept around a bit too long.

Anyway, Google was one choice, based on my need for...

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