Powerful. Cheap. Well-designed. Choose two of the three.
This bargain is true in most situations but especially with regards to buying laptops. Laptops have become so crucial in our lives, but they’re definitely expensive. Let’s take a look at when they’re cheapest.
We looked at Google Search Trends and Amazon Price data, which I got from Keepa. Let’s take a look at the Google Search Trends first:
We see two peaks in searches for “best_laptop_for_students”: back-to-school season (intuitive) and Black Friday season.
Just looking for deals, we see a huge spike mid-November.
“Buy a laptop” has 2 summer peaks (right before back to school and then back-to-school) and then another peak during Black Friday.
There’s 3 peaks with this one: Back-to-School, Black Friday, and Christmas.
There’s a noticeable trend in peaks of demand:
1-2 around Back to School
Black Friday
Occasionally Christmas time
But do these match the cheapest times to buy? This is when the price data from Keepa comes in. For simplification purposes, we just focused on MacBooks, but in the future we will look over other laptops 👀.
This is the scatter plot between weekly search interest and actual MacBook Prices. There are 3 points at the veryyyy bottom, showing the lowest prices.
Let’s take a further look at the relation between search interest and prices using statistics:
The correlation is -0.2735. This isn’t an extremely high score but the relationship cannot be ignored
the p-value is .12 (typically in stats, we choose an alpha-value, and if p-value < alpha-value, we say the relationship is significant!). Typically, the alpha value is .05, but we can set the alpha value to be .15 and say that this is significant — this isn’t actually good practice, but in our case, where our data is limited, it may be the best we can do.
The ANOVA statistic is 2.4837. This is a measure of how both series of data (search interest and macbook prices) vary together.
the p-value is .1 - assuming an alpha of .15, this is significant.
Let’s do some investigation of those 3 dots at the bottom. We are going to highlight ‘black friday data’ in green, ‘christmas data’ in gold, and ‘in between’ in blue - where
Christmas Gold, Black Friday Green, In Between is Blue.
It’s interesting: one of the three points at the very bottom are during the period between Black Friday and Christmas!
That’s an interesting insight: potentially between Black Friday and Christmas is the cheapest time to buy! Coupons may still apply, the demand is present but not extreme, and prices are typically low!
As for the other causes, further analysis will be needed. In the future, I’ll expand the price data over several years and collect information on more laptops to see if there is a clearer trend!
That’s all for now folks - this was a pretty intense article. Stay tuned for more!