I REALLY want a tablet. I've set my eyes on a high end one (Galaxy Tab S 10.5") but I won't get it unless I can hit my side hustle goals. Or unless it magically drops below $200.
If you're OK with a 7" tablet, you can get a Nexus 7 (2012 or 2013 model) for not that much used. The 2013 model is going used for just over $100 on eBay, and are very solid tablets (my 2013 Nexus 7 is my primary tablet). The 2012 is cheaper, but performance is a lot worse on it. It's usable, but not nearly as nice as the 2013, for not a huge savings at this point.
Macbook air, iMac, iPad, iPhone, kindle. I work in tech and need to stay up to date with all the new possibilities. My company paid for all of it.
Yeah, working in tech does tend to lead to that. One nice thing about Apple hardware is that it holds value
absurdly well. Stupidly so, in some cases... I just upgraded my TV Mac Mini from a 2007 to a 2010 model (the old one was getting cranky, couldn't run the modern OSes, and generally wasn't doing the job so well anymore) for about $70, because I got a good deal on the new one and the old one went for an absurd amount on eBay.
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One thing I've found to be very useful/profitable (and am actually making use of today) is the willingness and ability to dive deeply into tech hardware & do low level repairs. A lot of stuff can be repaired for far less than the cost of replacement, or can be fixed for not that much money (if you have a bit of money to throw at the problem, you can often do it "for free"). I literally don't know how many laptops I've repaired or scrapped out over the years - people will give you something free if it's "broken," and frequently, the problem can be repaired for a few hours of time or $50 in parts. Full screen assemblies are easy to find on eBay, and if you have an older laptop, it's screen, separated, is probably worth more than the whole unit. I've purchased several broken machines of a type for very little, created one or two working machines out of it, and sold the entire lot of hardware for way more than I paid for the parts. Today, I'm going to spend a few hours of time repairing a laptop power jack for someone - it's intermittent, and this is a common failure of power jacks (I know, because I've repaired half a dozen). Pull it open, resolder it or replace it, and get paid in cash or beer. It's a pretty slick side gig. :)
My philosophy in college with regards to computers was, "If it's broken in some way, I literally cannot make it worse if I screw up trying to fix it." So I delved deeply into a lot of hardware that "wasn't working" in some way or another, and in most cases, was able to fix or otherwise make functional the device. My favorite repair was disabling the onboard RAM on a 12" Powerbook that had a bad bit of memory and glitched out graphics badly. I pulled it apart, found the DRAM chips on the board, and pulled the power pins for them up so they didn't get used. The machine lost 256MB RAM (of 1.2 installed), but an unusable machine became usable again. :) Worth a few hours...
