Top Tips For When To Buy A New Device
When is the best time to make the investment for new devices? You might be surprised at the answer.
It doesn’t matter how well you take care of your laptop, smartphone, or tablet, there will come a day when you need to upgrade and replace. If you’re diligent and/or fortunate enough that you’re not replacing due to sudden bad luck, breakage, misuse or misplacement, it can be hard to know just when it’s the right time to buy and what device to upgrade to.
Device Sell-By Dates
Device life cycles are generally based on the manufacturer’s need to drive hype, while still providing a range of affordable products that consumers at all price points can afford. After all, if Apple only offered its top-of-the-line MacBook Pro (currently priced at $1,800) in its stores, it would swiftly lose a large swath of their customer base who simply cannot afford such a price. However, the company always seeks to leave its customers wanting more, so they have to pace their release schedules accordingly.
Timing Is Everything
There are a number of factors that play into the decision to buy a new device. Buy it too early and you may spend full price. While waiting a few months, would probably be significantly cheaper. Buy it too late and you may find that, one month later, a major product release is revealed meaning your brand new device will be operational for less time. One of the main reasons for this is the so-called “planned obsolescence” not of hardware, but of certain software. We see this particularly with Apple, who might, for example, sell an iPhone with a storage capacity that, within a few major software upgrades, will be completely untenable and unusable. In other words: it’s not dodgy hardware it’s that the company’s enforced software updates outstrips it.
So what’s the best approach? While companies intentionally keep their release schedules under wraps, you can usually tell a lot by looking at the price drops of previous models. Take, for example, the new 2016 MacBook Pro. Many people find the price unattainable. But, as Forbes put it, “Retailers will eventually offer discounts on the new MacBook Pros. Take the 12-inch MacBook. Roughly six months after it was introduced in March of 2015 at $1,299 (1.1GHz/256GB) and $1,599 (1.2GHz/512GB), Best Buy began to regularly discount it. Sometimes it was just $100 cheaper but other times Best Buy slashed the price by $300.”
Tips From An Expert
The lesson here is that roughly a third or a quarter of the way through a device’s life cycle—that is, the amount of time it is the most up-to-date device on the market—is the best time to get the lowest price for the maximum utility. You can, of course, buy cheaper models that aren’t top of the line as soon as the new model comes out, but you will undoubtedly find those products are relevant and operational for less time, which can be frustrating for consumers.
Additional Resources
The website MacRumors has a handy guide for this process, as it can indicate how long previous devices were on the market as the top of the line model. With its “days since last release” feature, you can see how much time has elapsed since the product entered the market, and how long, on average, it has to go before another product is released in its place. With the new iPhone 7, it appears that now is a relatively opportune time to buy, as it has been more than two months since its release, but there is still a while longer to go until it will be replaced by the next ‘must-have’ iPhone version.