WWDC and Hardware Prices: A Study of Almost Nothing Happening

The Event, Described Without Adjectives

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference begins today, June 8, and runs through Friday. There will be a keynote of approximately 100 minutes. Software will be announced. The Editorial Staff will watch, as we do every June, with the particular alertness of people measuring something other than what is on screen.

Readers ask us, every year at this time, whether they should wait for WWDC to buy hardware. It is a reasonable question with an unreasonable amount of data behind the answer, which is: no — but also yes, for a reason that has nothing to do with price.

The Data

We have logged Apple hardware street prices through three consecutive WWDCs. Two of the last five conferences included hardware announcements; three included none. The price movements, presented in a table the staff prepared before being asked:

| Year | Hardware on stage | Tracked laptop, week before | Week after | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Yes (15" MacBook Air) | $1,199 (M2 13", MSRP) | $1,099 | −$100, by decree |
| 2024 | No | $989 (M3 13", street) | $984 | −$5, origin unknown |
| 2025 | No | $899 (M4 13", street) | $899 | $0 |

The 2023 row is the exception that defines the rule: when Apple introduced the 15-inch Air on stage, it simultaneously cut the M2 13-inch's official price by $100, to $1,099. Note who moved it. Apple.com prices move only when Apple moves them; the third-party street prices that same week shifted by single-digit dollars. In 2024 and 2025, with no hardware on stage, our logs record the keynote's measurable effect on laptop pricing as a rounding error. The M4 Air sat at $899 the Friday before last year's keynote and $899 the Friday after, holding through five days of announcements with the composure of a monument. The largest WWDC-week move we have logged on any tracked product in three years was $20, on an Apple Watch, and it reversed within five days.

Three years. One price cut, by decree. Zero discounts. WWDC is, measurably, not a sale. It has never claimed to be one; the claim is supplied annually by headlines and hope.

What the Keynote Actually Changes

Here is the part we hold to be underpriced: the keynote's real financial payload is the support list — the quiet slide enumerating which devices will run the new software and, by omission, which will not.

Last June, iOS 26 dropped the iPhone XR and XS; the XR was sold new by Apple into 2021. macOS Tahoe was announced as the final release for Intel Macs, closing a fifteen-year architecture with a bullet point. Neither announcement changed a single sticker that week. Both repriced the used market overnight: a device that has just lost its software future is worth less every remaining day you own it, whether or not anyone updates the listing.

Support horizons are denominators. A $999 laptop supported for eight years costs $124.88 per year; supported for five, $199.80. This week's keynote will adjust denominators across the entire used and refurbished market in roughly four seconds of stage time, and the discounts everyone waited for will not arrive. If you are buying used or refurbished Apple hardware, the only responsible act of the week is to wait until the lists publish and read them. The lists are free. That is the discount.

Keynotes, Considered as a Genre

The keynote is a genre in which the future is announced to music. Nothing shown is for sale that day; nothing already for sale is discounted that day; and yet the staff watches every year, taking notes on software that will matter in September and prices that will not change until November. We have come to regard the keynote as weather: scheduled, consequential, and perfectly indifferent to whether we watch. Several staff members find this framing comforting. One finds it profoundly unsettling and watches anyway, which may be the most honest review of the genre we can offer.

Guidance for the Week

1. Do not wait for a WWDC discount. Three years of logs say there is no such object.

2. If you are buying used or refurbished, wait for the support lists — roughly 100 minutes of keynote, then a verification pass. A device dropped from support this week is a different purchase by Friday.

3. If hardware is announced on stage, the outgoing model becomes interesting in two to six weeks, as channel inventory clears. That is when the price moves. It will not move today.

4. The genuinely scheduled discounts arrive in mid-July, at Prime Day, five weeks from now. The calendar, unlike the keynote, is not a mystery.

Our own pre-registered prediction, filed here for later grading: the MacBook Air M4's street price this Friday will sit within $10 of today's logged $879. If we are wrong, we will report it at length. We do not expect to be writing at length.

— The BuyGetRewards Editorial Staff

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