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I’ve been realizing lately that anyone who is thinking of buying an apple product has their own strategy about when they’re going to buy one.
“I’m going to wait for the next generation of ipod to come out so I can get the first previous one for cheap.” Or “I’m going to wait until the next lineup of intel macs to come out and get one of those, I never get a revision A product.” Currently, I have my own strategy – I’m going to wait until Leopard comes out to upgrade to a new iMac, saving $100-$200 on the new OS instead of purchasing it separately.
Everyone has felt burned by Apple before – I bought an iMac G5 right before the intel versions came out, and am still filled with slight jealousy. Jon Stewart joked about the process too – “When I walked in 4 months later with my mac, the salesman looked at me like I’d dragged in a civil war-era musket and dropped it on the counter”. He said that the salesman told him that the G5 was the same processor they used to launch the space shuttle (hard to believe), but alas, the processor that was designed to save human lives couldn’t be upgraded a few months later to play the latest game.
I hardly need to mention the latest round of iPhone updates and price cuts that left “early adapters” fuming, so much so that Apple relented and gave them a price cut. Anyone who bought Logic 7 for $1000 before september must feel pretty burned by their $500 price cut. I write this post as a question – does anyone know the best time to buy an apple product? How do you buy one without feeling like a sucker 2 months later? Apple runs on a release schedule and there are both quarterly and annual events that are generally predictable. Events such as the WWDC practically stimulated the invention of liveblogging, with sites such as mac rumors and gizmodo covering the details the second they are announced. Generally I don’t know about these events until they happen and the blogosphere explodes and I find myself refreshing one of these sites every 5 seconds. But someone has to know when these happen or they wouldn’t be liveblogging at the press conference. It wouldn’t take much effort to make a timeline of their release schedule and try and strategically plan to buy their products shortly after those releases. For instance, the annual WWDC conference occurred in June last year, so if it’s near June, WAIT and don’t buy an apple product.
But I mean apple fanboys and insiders seem to know a lot about this stuff, but I don’t see info about the best time to buy a mac online, or can’t find it easily. I tried googling these phrases, and will therefore attract people looking for when to buy apple hardware, or buy apple hardware strategy, or buy apple hardware after os release, or apple release schedule timeline, or apple annual release schedule. Sorry. But hopefully I can attract some people who are knowledgeable about this stuff and can help us out. Feel free to post in the comments.

Update
My friend Caleb pointed me toward two apple support pages that show the introduction dates of the macbook pro and the iMac:
http://support.apple.com/specs/macbook/
http://support.apple.com/specs/imac/

This might suggest that they’ll release a macbook in November. The iMac is more ambiguous – maybe early 2008?

Update
Leonard from Digg points me to MacTracker, an OS X database program that has every release by mac:
http://mactracker.dreamhosters.com/
He also says that Apple almost always releases new hardware in January. Thanks Leonard!

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