If fortune smiles I possibly would like to get my daughter a Mac notebooklike one of thesein the next few months. What are the best places for Mac deals?
That’s pretty much exactly what we just bought. We were looking for a deal, too, but Apple dealers don’t really have sales, and the price is pretty much the same at every store (as far as I know). What you can do, and we almost did this, is buy a refurbished laptop. We found that the refurbished price wasn’t low enough to justify buying refurbished over new (only about $100 less at this point, since the price of the 13" MacBook just dropped).
Macs don’t really go on sale. Apple seems to set their own prices, and only really lower them when new models are out/coming out. If you have a working college email address you can qualify for an education discount which usually gets you $100 off and/or a free iPod or something. There might be other ways to qualify for an edu discount but I’ve only ever gotten one for having a legit college email address that Apple recognized. Only other option I’ve seen is checking out Apple’s refurbished products store. But those discounts are not that great either.
About the only real discount you’ll find other than via the educational market is to buy it from Amazon.
I get discounts through my employer and an outfit called LifeCare, and while LifeCare will get me Apple products for less than at Amazon, having to pay shipping generally makes Amazon come out slightly ahead on the deal.
When new model(s) come out, sometimes you can ge a deal on the now old model
Brian
Look in the refurb section of the online Apple store.
This is true, and I’ve seen the older Macbook Airs go for a lot less than the original price, but I doubt the discount will amount to a lot when you’re looking at the cheaper models.
Still, the new models are just in, so it may be worth looking around for deals in the coming weeks/months.
Balthisar has the best suggestion. Here is a link. They have a couple of the previous-generation MacBooks, which have basically the same specs as far as processor speeds and so forth as the new one, for as little as $649. And they are covered by the same one-year warranty that brand-new Macs come with. But the stock changes daily and I would expect that the old MacBooks will go quickly, as they have a couple of features that the new ones don’t. The new ones have no FireWire port, no separate in/out for audio and no IR sensor for remotes.