Electronics pricing is not weather; it is tide. Product families refresh on annual cycles, retailers clear inventory on quarterly ones, and the intersection of the two produces genuinely predictable deals. The calendar below is the distillation of several years of price-tracker data — treat it as a prior, not a promise.
The calendar
- January — post-holiday clearances; last year's TVs and audio at their floor
- February–April — quiet season; use it for price-match policies on staples
- Spring — laptop refresh season; previous-generation configs get cut hard
- July — the big mid-year sale event; wide but shallow discounts
- August–September — back-to-school promotions, strongest on mid-range laptops
- October–November — the deep season: model-year clearances stack with event pricing
- December — holiday bundles; good on accessories, mediocre on the devices themselves
The rule that beats the calendar
Launch-cycle arithmetic dominates everything else. The moment a successor is announced, the outgoing model's street price falls — typically fifteen to twenty-five percent within two months — while the product itself remains essentially the machine you wanted. The one-year-old flagship phone is the single most reliable deal in consumer electronics, and it recurs every single autumn.
When to ignore all of this
Three situations justify paying list price: you need the device now (prices are not a savings account); the model is newly reviewed and supply-constrained (waiting costs more than the discount); or it is a category with genuine step-change improvements — early solid-state battery cars, new-display laptops — where last year's model is meaning-fully last year's.
One warning label on the whole enterprise: price trackers have made “discounts” theatrical. Check the price-history chart on any deal site before believing a strikethrough number. The list price is a costume, and this is the season everyone wears it.