Ask HN: When is a good time to buy a laptop?
With potential price increases and new chipsets coming out, does anyone have any recommendations on when to buy a new laptop?
No matter how long you wait, there will always be another chipset coming out, or a lower price. A week after you lay your money down, so it seems. Get off the treadmill.
I tend to buy as good a machine as I can afford and then hold that machine for many years.
I use this same philosophy for buying cars, I've owned both a SAAB and a Mercedes for 14 years each - two cars, 28 years - not bad at all.
A Lenovo T410 bought in 2010 is still quite usable. I have only upgraded the storage from 500gig to 2 terabytes, and have repaired the keyboard over those twelve years or so. It's now my 'spare'. I bought a P53 with 5 terabytes of SSD and a 4K display as its replacement two years ago.
If you like ultrabooks, they can come off of corporate leases all of the time and you can find some screaming deals on nice Thinkpads, Latitudes, etc.
In my area there's just a random dude who works as an "electronics recycler" - he buys them off of MSPs in bulk and sells off rebundled PCs. So he just keeps a huge stack of Thinkpads, Latitudes, Probooks, and MacBooks all for about $200-$400.
Nearly every metro area I've lived in has had "a guy" or two who does something similar.
If there really is no one, there are a couple of liquidation websites you can go to (PCLiquidations, Backmarket).
If a new laptop is going to massacre your budget, then consider getting an older one. Just make sure that you can upgrade certain components, like the SSD and memory, if you need to.