Blogocentric Formulations

Day 17: Impulse Buys

*Written as part of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" 

Day 17 Prompt: Write about a silly impulse buy that you only regretted after bringing it home. What made you think it was a good idea?

Oh, man. I have way more of these silly impulse purchases than I'd care to admit. Thankfully, they're almost all relatively small purchases and not something that's hugely expensive or elaborate. I'm downright obsessive about researching when it comes to buying cars, booking vacations, choosing an insurance plan, etc. And I will buy lots of inexpensive things on a whim (especially books... damn you Kindle Daily Deal! {e:shakes_fist}), but the one thing I actually shell out money for that I don't need and yet compulsively feel like I do... is software and software upgrades. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I regret the purchases, but more often than not I'm paying for an upgrade to a program that I don't really use all that often or that I just want to have the latest version of rather than actually needing whatever new functionality it provides.

Case in point, I just bought an upgrade to Final Draft, the software I use for my screenwriting. Final Draft has a long and storied history of expensive upgrades that don't really offer that much new functionality, and they don't seem particularly concerned with new cutting-edge features so much as doing the bare minimum to keep it from being completely antiquated and out-of-date. For this particular update, it would be more apt to call it Final Draft version 8.1 - for it's minor improvement upon the previous version 8 - rather than Final Draft 9, which implies an actual whole new version. The only added features were completely minimal. For example, one of their biggest updates was compatibility with Retina displays. (Since Retina displays fit twice as many pixels into the same area as regular screens, a non-Retina compatible program looks pixellated because each pixel is stretched over two Retina pixels to compensate. Thus, a Retina display viewing a non-Retina program will see menu items and text as grainy and digitized.) Retina displays were introduced for Macbooks in October 2012, which means it took Final Draft over a year to develop a basic update that most other programs (Office, web browsers, etc.) had implemented within a couple months of Retina displays being released. The price for Final Draft 9? $79 to upgrade (regularly $99), $199 to purchase (regularly $249).

But I just had to have the upgrade. I rationalized it by saying that the pixellated look of Final Draft 8 was annoying, but I didn't really need it. The same with other software upgrades I've done recently. I didn't need iOS 7 for my iPhone, but I upgraded on the day it was released anyway. I didn't need to buy a second screenwriting program, but hey, you never know when you might have to work with someone that uses that other program instead!

I'm not someone who normally regrets purchases, but I will say that many times I'll purchase (or upgrade) software and have a "Well I guess I didn't really need to buy that" moment for a few days afterward. Thankfully, though, some programs are switching to a subscription-based program (like Adobe Creative Cloud) which allows me to have the latest version of every program the minute it's released, for a low monthly fee. Of course, if too many places start offering that I'll have to really start checking myself or I'll find myself with a $500/month recurring software bill!