Ben Brooks asked an interesting question today. If you had to start over, buying all of your apps from scratch, in what order would you buy them? I answer this question every time I Nuke and Pave my hard drive, reinstalling my operating system and applications from scratch in the order I need them most. The first applications I always install are the fundamental services and utilities I can’t live without. Over time my list of applications has diminished as Mac OS X’s built-in utilities and services have become more powerful. If I had to start over today with an empty list of serial numbers and nothing purchased in the Mac App Store this is the order in which I would replace my apps.

• Dropbox because syncing, backing up, and sharing my data is just as important as creating it. $200 a yr.
• Cinch I have become addicted to dividing my screens into two views instead of one. $7
• BBEdit the Mac’s most powerful text editor “doesn’t suck” for writing, coding, and marking up my web projects. $99.99
• Transmit if I am not relying on Coda’s built-in FTP client I am using Transmit in connection with BBEdit to get published. $34
• Pixelmator a beautifully native alternative to Adobe Photoshop. $19
• Lightroom for organizing my trial and error collection of DNGs. $299
• NetNewsWire Lite the news comes for free with this beautifully designed minimalistic news reader. Free
• Twitterrific the premier Twitter client for the Mac, and the best way to get the word out about Egg Freckles. $9.99
• VectorDesigner a possible alternative for Adobe Illustrator. $29.99
• WriteRoom for when I am too distracted to write in BBEdit. $24.99
• TaskPaper a neat way of managing a plain text lists. $29.99
• The Incident for dodging a never ending barrage of falling objects. $1.99
• Adobe Photoshop the premier graphics manipulation tool of the modern world. $699.95
• Adobe Illustrator it draws crisp mathematically correct lines so I dont’t have to. $599.95
• Adobe InDesign for laying out pages on dead tree. $699.95

The total suggested retail price for all of these apps is $2765.76, but the Adobe applications alone make up nearly $2,000 of the total price. Needless to say I could use that money for buying a better Mac. I know I could survive on much less.