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I analyzed the rising laptop prices in the coronavirus induced shortage. Here’s what I found.
When the corona-virus started I read this Kotaku article about the future of hardware prices and how there will be a shortage. I bought a laptop immediately, as I wanted to do that for a long time anyway.. but the hypothesis of rising prices still scratched that part of my brain so I decided to use Czech e-shop aggregator, heureka.cz, which tracks all the prices of all the e-shops. I’ve used it to investigate the price changes.
I am no data scientist and I’ve done this mainly for fun. I am using basic trend analysis and I rely mainly on the graphical representations.
I downloaded price data for 50 most popular laptops in the past 2 months and plotted the minimal price they were available for in Czech e-shops. The laptop name and price difference are in each label.
I did not see any significantly rising prices, on the contrary — the prices seem to be plummeting in most cases. I plotted a graph with the trend of each laptop price since the beginning of March, when the corona started seriously spreading.
So, the hypothesis of laptops getting more expensive was wrong. They are getting cheaper.
