Six years ago I was invited by Best Buy to join a new program they were launching named TIN. The TIN members are responsible for reviewing products sold in Best Buy stores. The TIN program works like this:
At random times, several times a month, Best Buy emails the TIN members with a link to a website that is randomly updated with random products. Whichever TIN member logs into the website the fastest gets to pick whatever product is available. What kind of products? Anything you’ve seen for sale in a Best Buy.
If the TIN member wins what I now call “the product lottery,” the jackpot is that the product is shipped to your house. In exchange for free products, TIN members are required to write a product review of at least 1,000 words which is then published on Best Buy’s website. There’s a set of writing guidelines, legal agreements, and other stuff but that’s the basics. The next time you are shopping at Best Buy . com if you click on Reviews, look for the TIN badge next to the reviewer’s name. It is an amazing program to be a part of and I’m grateful to Best Buy for the opportunity.
Over the years as I’ve written reviews for the TIN program, I’ve experimented with different ways to express if I think Product X is worth buying. I’m the computer geek in the family so everyone is always asking me what version of X technology they should buy. But I was also curious: how does all this stuff compare to itself?
I decided to answer that by combining six years of products into my first User’s guide, which you can view at the link below. The site focuses on laptops, desktops and monitors. While the TIN program has never provided me with any Apple computers, my day job does, so I went ahead and threw those onto the site as well.
Before you go exploring, a few words:
There are no affiliation links.
There is no method to buy the product you see from my site. If you do want to purchase the item I’d be remiss if I did not point you to Best Buy .com to complete that purchase.
I’m continuing to explore ways to make this data more useful to others, so if you have any ideas for improvement please share them. For me it’s the top-right hand selection “Rank By” that makes these pages shine.
If you want to compare Monitors instead of computers, that’s in the top-right navigation as well.
I hope you find it useful. I’ll be updating it each time a new product arrives.