It’s springtime in, it’s the month of May and retailers have just rolled out their new product lines for the year.  I was scanning through some of the offers from some of the major electronics retailers in the United States and I noticed that laptop prices in general are running relatively cheap compared to where they were last fall.

Now for the most part the clearance sales and all the pre-Vista savings opportunities are gone, but the net price for laptops appear to be lower than where they were six or seven months ago.  Now given the fact that these are supposed to be the new models rolled out to the stores with their new setups product lines this breaks conventional wisdom a bit unless the price point for laptops and computers in general has fallen yet again.

This would be a positive for consumers but a large negative for computer manufacturers.  Given the hiccups in the economy and the lagging housing market its possible that home computer users are purchasing fewer computers presumably with all of that extra home-equity credit that they used to have.  For those people that still have financial liquidity and are looking to migrate over to Windows Vista this might actually be a decent time to pick up some decent deals on computer hardware.

I scanned some of the offers from several different retailers using the coupon cheap website which enabled me to take a look at some of the high-level discounts offered by each of the stores on the same pages.  I took a look at CompUSA, which is had yet another difficult year in retail, and Circuit City, which had a very difficult year in flat-panel TV sets.  I also looked at many others from Office Depot to Best Buy to Dell through the same site.  Across the board there were many offers for laptop and desktop hardware that were relatively cheap compared to the prices on the same hardware last fall.

It’s also possible that retailers such as Circuit City or cracking the whip on hardware manufacturers across the board after retailers learned some hard lessons about the pricing of flat-panel TVs last fall.  The retailers do not want to get hit with inventory that will not move in a shaky economy.  That puts the burden back on electronics manufacturers to heavily and sent buyers to buy and buy now.

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