When is a good time to buy a laptop?

When you need one.

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.

I almost exclusively buy used. If you want consumer laptops, the end or beginning of a school year is a great time to pick up a cheap but good book.

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.

If you need a laptop now, then buy one now. But if you keep waiting until the next greatly-hyped model comes out, chances are you're going keep waiting and waiting.

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.

When it will help you make more money than it costs.

I waited for serious discounts, about 30% for my Lenovo X1 Carbon. Lenovo has sales every now and then.

When you lose the one you have.

Can you get a student discount at all? Now is typically a good time.

Next time you see the M1 MBA at 799$.