Spend money on the microphone, or borrow a good one, and get a mike stand and a pop shield. Particularly if you are doing any audio work, whether recording or

Spend money on the microphone, or borrow a good one, and get a mike stand and a pop shield. Particularly if you are doing any audio work, whether recording or podcasting, or otherwise. A decent low-end cardioid condenser produces audio output far superior to a cheaper mike, and vastly better than the audio you'll get from an integrated mike. And yes, iMovie and GarageBand and the rest of the tool-chain can be used to produce reasonable content, once you get the hang of the tools, and can also be combined with the application screen recording that is available within the QuickTime tool in Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6. Another area with the Apple iLife tool-chain involves how you can generate graphics (diagrams, moving plots, etc) for insertion into technical presentations. While static pages and screen captures and screen video are all easy, I haven't found an entirely satisfactory way to generate more advanced graphics for inclusion.