DrosieD

Misty, if you're looking at buying a Bernina, decide if you are doing straight sewing or quilting. If you want to do embroidery it's cheaper to buy the unit with the machine. I have a Pfaff I use for embroidery but use a Bernina 770 for quilting because of the stitch quality and reliability. Decide what size throat space you want, distance from needle to right. The 700 series has a roughly 10" harp. I like the 770. It's durable, well made and to me not a difficult machine. You can go down to the 400 or 500 series but you lose about 3" of harp space. The 700 series has the jumbo bobbin. I'm still using the first full bobbin that came with my machine! Granted I was sidelined with a rotator cuff repair. I can't speak for the 800 series other than the salesperson informed me they are quite fussy.

DrosieD

Pfaff will accept most any USB stick on the market. They do recommend for transferring designs to your machine not to use more than 2mg. stick. That's why places like DIME sell cute sewing-themed ones. If you have 1gig or more the machine slows down looking for the design. Imagine searching through 1,000 or more designs to find the one you want.

Word to the wise, if you're investing in embroidery designs, keep a backup to the cloud or a USB stick. I've had numerous and thousands of dollars in lost in portable drives gone bad. I'd suggest the cloud, it's always going to be there.