<p>When’s the best time to buy a laptop/desktop for college? </p>
<p>Is it cheaper to buy one earlier in the summer or when school’s going to start. Like do stores raise the prices near the end of summer because they know kids are going to college and they need laptops or do they lower them for “back to school” sales?</p>
<p>Yea...and plus I don't really need one right now. I can wait until later near the start of school.</p>
<p>I would wait. Most colleges run package deals at the beginning of the year. In addition, if you are looking at something like the Mac Book (with the intel processor) the prices might start to decrease by fall (just a guesstimate) since they will then have been out for a little longer.</p>
<p>apple has a free ipod promo right now too when you purchase a macbook.</p>
<p>Wait until mid July, when the new Duo Core processors come out. Laptop prices should fall.</p>
<p>The Intel Core Duo's are already out (but expensive). As a reminder to all heading to UCs, you get the educational discount on Apple products as a UC student and can buy a new computer a year. From my experience this means Macs are about $200 cheaper than what you can find anywhere else. UCD (and probably most other UCs) are Apple authorized dealers and can do Apple computer repairs (not that they break down a lot) which is a lot easier because you can drop your computer on campus for repairs rather than taking it offsight or shipping it somewhere. </p>
<p>When you buy your computers, you might want to have your parents check their home insurance policies to add your new computers (and all connecting equipment) to their policies. I only pay about $16 per year on a policy rider that covers EVERYTHING that might happen to the computer or equipment that plugs into it (including my digital cameras). This coverage includes hardware, software, theft, loss, dropping damage etc with no deductible (and you can pay a little more for even higher coverage). Given my equipment, I have coverage for our stuff (my daughter is heading off to a UC this fall) at $3000 per incident. Although my coverage is through a military assoc insurance company (USAA) it is very reasonable but I suspect there are deals approaching this for other companies. I don't bother with the add-on apple coverage because of this much cheaper and more comprehensive coverage.</p>
<p>Beast was referring to Merom, which is Core 2 Duo. It is about 20% faster than Core Duo right now. I don't think that will cause prices to fall across the board in anything but Core Duo laptops. But, it shouldn't make that big of a difference anyway.</p>