Good gadgets at the right price

Given the plethora of brands and rapid obsolescence of devices, tech shopping can get confusing. Sam Grobart helps you clear the clutter

In the film “Jerry Maguire,” Tom Cruise delivers this line describing what it’s like to be the sports agent who represents Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character, a football player: “It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, OK?”

I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds remarkably close to what buying tech products can feel like. (Or maybe I’m too emotionally invested.)

Think about all the variables you have to account for when buying a new TV, printer or laptop. First, you have to figure out what it is you want to buy – which is often no easy task, given the plethora of brands out there.

Some brands even have their own plethora of models. Have you ever looked at Panasonic’s site for TVs? It has seven different 65-inch TVs for sale. Not three, not even five – seven.

Who can sort through all that, much less keep the model numbers straight?
Once you have sifted through all the details and made your decision, it would be nice to know that the product you’ve set your heart on is not going to be replaced soon. Nobody wants to suffer the indignity of getting the Platinum 3300xl, only to discover that a new Platinum 3400xls (now with TurboLasers!) will hit stores next month for the same price.
Then you have to figure out where to buy your carefully considered choice. And there, you run into two major issues: You don’t want to pay too much, but you also want a retailer that is reliable.

I’ve developed a little system to address these problems, a series of steps that helps ensure I’m getting a good deal when I am shopping – whatever the product I’m buying. Once I’ve run through it, I can rest easy knowing I got what I wanted and paid the right price for it.

Confirm your choice: There are many variables to consider when deciding whether a product is right for you. That being said, when I shop for tech items I generally go to the same few sites, either to confirm the choice I reached on my own or to help guide me to a choice if I am not well versed in the category.

The first site I always go to is thewirecutter.com. The Wirecutter could also have been named www.showmethegoodone.com, because that is what it does. Its independent reviewers do not provide an exhaustive library of product reviews; they just tell you which product is the best in a given category. If you are looking for, say, a laptop on The Wirecutter, you will find a well-annotated shortlist of laptops organized like this: “best laptop,” “best gaming laptop,” “best cheap laptop.”

There are only a few subcategories for each product type, so you are not caught between meaningless distinctions: “best laptop for students” alongside “best laptop for teenagers.”

Each selection is bolstered by an authoritative, concise article that explains how the reviewer came to this conclusion.

Even better, The Wirecutter stays up to date. Recently, under the entry for “Best Laptop” (the site awards this designation to Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air, and I would have to agree) was an update made two days after Apple announced upgrades to its laptop line. “We’re waiting for the reviews of the new Ivy Bridge-powered MacBook Air and other competitors,” the entry reads. “Should be any day now. Give us a week or two, and don’t buy anything right now.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Watch for obsolescence: You want to know that what you want to buy is the most current version – and will stay that way for a while.

A couple of years ago, some exceedingly bright minds from the worlds of computer science and business created Farecast, a site that takes reams of data about airline ticket pricing and analyses it to let consumers know if the fares for trips they want to take at a given moment are going to go up or down soon.

The price-prediction engine was later bought by Microsoft and incorporated into that company’s Bing Travel site.

The founders of Farecast then turned their attention to consumer technology. This was much more challenging because new products are being replaced by even newer products at an alarming rate. Decide.com is the result.

On the Decide site, you can search for tech products and find out whether one is about to be supplanted by a newer, better model, as well as whether the price is likely to rise or fall. Decide uses all kinds of algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence to comb not only pricing data, but also articles and blog posts to predict a product’s price and life span.

Armed with that data, you can either move ahead and buy with confidence, or lie low for a little while and feel extra knowledgeable.
Find the right retailer: Decide can also send you to an online retailer. But it pays to do a little double-checking.

I conducted several searches over a couple of weeks, and each time I got a different result. Sometimes the site I was sent to had the lowest price around, sometimes not. Sometimes Bing’s shopping search produced a winner, other times Google’s did.
One way to automate this back-and-forth is to use InvisibleHand, a plug-in for Firefox, Chrome or Safari browsers. This free add-on works within the browser; whenever you look at a product page with a price, it alerts you if a lower price can be found somewhere else. This is great for tech products because, while I like a few retailers, I am not loyal to them. I’ll drop any of them like third-period French if I find out a better price is available from a reputable seller.

There are a couple of things to remember when comparing online sale prices.
First, pay no attention to a product’s base price. You should only be interested in the total price, because some retailers charge sales tax and an arm and a leg for shipping.
Also, the absolute lowest price may be from some fly-by-night operation whose primary expertise is in disappointing its customers, so don’t just shoot for the lowest price. If I do not know the retailer, I do a quick check to see how it is rated on sites like Google and Bing (knowing full well that these ratings can be manipulated by the retailers themselves).

I try to find a seller with a high overall rating and a large base of reviews. (At least hundreds; thousands are preferable.)

Check for any coupons: It may turn out that your online shop has promotions that could knock an extra buck or 50 from the price. Finding out takes all of 60 seconds.
Plenty of sites collect online coupons and promotional codes, but I usually wind up checking RetailMeNot.com, one of the larger and more established players in this field. There you can find codes for free shipping, 20 percent off and other discounts and deals that might otherwise have eluded you.

RetailMeNot, which is not limited to tech products, can be a bit of a gamble. You may find a code that applies to your purchase, but it may have expired. Still, it is worth checking.
Does my system save every last penny? Might there be a cheaper option out there? Sure, but at some point, shopping research becomes a matter of diminishing returns. You have to pull the trigger eventually, and I have to assume there are far better things to do than spend hours researching which sound bar speaker to buy and where to buy it.
I wouldn’t know that personally, but I have to assume.