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Chapter 1: When is the best time to buy new tech gadgets?
Tech Thursday on The Last Word. With the 100% electric X-Bang G6. Packed full of tech. It's time for Tech Thursday and Andy O'Donoghue has a great idea for us this evening. The tech buying calendar. When is the best time to buy particular items that you might have a grow for?
This is interesting Andy because you get hit with things like there's a certain company at the moment offering what it calls Prime Day. You get various things like What is it, Black Friday and you get Christmas, obviously, and you get all the times of the year. But are there ideal times for buying different tech items?
The calendar really does make a difference, Matt. Yeah, for sure. And not just on big ticket items, smaller ones also. But I would say there are very distinct kind of differences. across the sectors like televisions, fitness trackers, smartwatches, smartphones a really obvious one and even laptops and tablets.
And when you buy does make a difference and it can make a substantial amount of difference in the amount of money you spend and also in the specification or kind of the quality of the device that you buy.
But give us the smartphone example first. When is it a time not to buy?
So the worst time to upgrade your smartphone is late August or early September.
Why?
And that is because the consumer tech world operates on a pretty unshakable autumn release schedule. Apple and Google consistently... have their big keynotes in September and October. New iPhone in September. And of course, there is this release cycle with Apple, which tends to be, you know, a new version, a new numbered iPhone, and then kind of the step-down model maybe the year later.
But this year, of course, we'll probably have a new, say, iPhone, foldable iPhone. But if you buy a premium smartphone in August, it means you're paying top tier money for a phone that will essentially be last year's model three or four weeks later.
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Chapter 2: What are the ideal times to purchase smartphones?
OK, what about televisions? When's the best time of year to buy a television? Because I'd suspect that they were quite expensive recently as a lot of places were trying to sell TVs for the World Cup.
Chapter 3: Why should you avoid buying smartphones in late August or early September?
And we talked about it ourselves and there were great deals. But yes, there was huge movement on people buying new TVs. Generally, buying a TV at the start of December is the worst time because there's all that time off over Christmas, specials, people at home, the whole family environment. People say, oh, we need to get a big telly. and people kind of upgrade.
And really, once the Black Friday has happened, television prices can spike by around 15% into December, believe it or not. And you do see this in the statistics. So the sweet spot for buying a TV is in springtime, from about March into May. And it's interesting, it's a little bit like the smartphone market, because that's when the manufacturing giants
Samsung and LG and Sony to an extent, that's when they roll out the big new flagship models. So to clear the warehouse and showrooms, they will slash prices of the predecessor model by up to 40 or 50%. And that is a huge difference because TV technology... incrementally improves. It doesn't get hugely better every year.
So, if you can be happy spending 40 to 50% less, getting last year's model, which is only slightly different.
Which is going to be a brilliant TV. Exactly.
I mean, there are almost no bad TVs anymore. So, absolutely, that spring purchase.
Does that suggest, Andy, that if you're going to be really clever about buying something that's really expensive, and I'm saying anything over ā¬1,000 is really expensive, that you really need to discipline and keep tracking the figures maybe over a 12-month period and then understand how various products move in price and then purchase when you know that you've got the information for a good deal?
You do, absolutely. And there are websites you can use and it's worthwhile looking at people like which. We have less amount of very specific analysis for the Ireland-specific market, but the UK works in much the same way. And so it's worth looking out for things like the Black Friday and the Prime Day Squeeze discussions.
you know, that kind of late in the year and then early in the year, the spring clearance, which published those numbers. And over a period of a year, Matt, you can see a swing of 30 to 40% in the price of a TV, which is, as you say, a really good TV.
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