Looking for a New MacBook Pro? Now’s the Time To Buy – Kinda

Last year, I was working for a really crappy company. OK, the people there weren’t crappy, but the company sure was. I was promoted, and in that position, I was required to have a laptop. Except that they wouldn’t give me one. So for a while, I was using my 13-inch MacBook circa 2006, but it just wasn’t cutting the mustard working with programs such as Photoshop or InDesign. I ended up digging through the company supplies and I found a 17-inch MacBook Pro, which was awesome – for 2 months anyways, when the logic board died and the Apple store wanted $800 to fix it.

I wasn’t left with a lot of options, but I was doing what I dreamed of doing, so I decided to invest in my future. I decided to buy myself a new MacBook Pro, but I didn’t have $2k to do so. I went probing around the business sales option, since there was some option of my company buying the laptop for me. But when that went south, I contacted the salesperson and said, “So, the company isn’t going to buy this for me. What can you work out for me?” He responded, “Well, we have some of the older models still here, new in the box. They’re 2 weeks old now, but with the new models on the floor, we’ve got to sell them.”

This turned out to be a pretty good deal. I negotiated the laptop down something like $200, and it had everything I wanted and more. I walked out of there paying a little more than $1500 for my computer, with almost $300 in discounts. I got a sweet deal, and I love my MBP.

You might recall that Apple just introduced the new Intel i5 and i7 MacBook Pros this week, meaning that there are lots of perfectly good MacBook Pros out there in Apple stores and online for sale. In my experience, Apple was willing to haggle a bit to get the old model out the door, which made both of us happy in the end. Try the same thing yourself and see what you find. If you’ve been waiting to buy a MacBook Pro, the new chips are definitely a motivator. But if you want a sweet deal, go for last week’s model. Might save you some cash.