Every keynote season, thousands of people have the same nervous thought
It goes something like this: I was going to sell my Mac this month, but Apple has an event coming up, so maybe I should wait and see what they announce first. Maybe the new one changes things. Maybe my old one drops in value the second the new one exists. Better to wait.
It's a reasonable-sounding thought. It's also, almost always, the wrong call. Here's the actual answer.
Value doesn't drop when the new Mac ships. It drops when people believe it's coming.
This is the part almost everyone gets backwards. Your current MacBook doesn't lose value on the day a new model lands in stores. It loses value the moment buyers start expecting one. Rumours, leaks, a keynote invite landing in inboxes: perception moves the market well before the product does. By the time the new chip is actually announced on stage, plenty of that repricing has already happened in people's heads.
Which means waiting for the announcement to "see how bad it is" is waiting to watch a thing that's already underway.
There's always a new one. That's not a reason to wait, it's the reason waiting never ends.
Apple ships new Mac chips on a tight, fairly predictable rhythm these days: roughly annually since the switch to Apple Silicon, sometimes with more than one refresh landing in a single year across different models. That cadence is exactly why "I'll wait for the next one" is a trap with no floor. There genuinely is always a next one. Wait for this September's event and you're just queuing up to wait for next September's.
At some point the waiting has to stop being about the product and start being honest about what it really is: reluctance to let go.
After a launch, you're not the only one selling
Here's the practical reason timing genuinely matters, not just the psychological one. The moment a new Mac is announced, a wave of current owners decides, at roughly the same time, to sell their old one and upgrade. That's simple supply and demand: a sudden flood of similar devices hits the resale market together, and buyers, sensing choice, expect to pay less for any one of them. Sell into that flood and you're one voice in a crowd all shouting the same thing.
Sell before it, and you're not competing with that crowd at all.
So, straight answer: sell before the announcement, not after
If you're planning to upgrade anyway, sell your current Mac before the new one is announced, or right at announcement, not weeks later once the new model has actually shipped and everyone else has had the same idea you did. If you're not upgrading and just weighing whether to cash out an old Mac you don't use much, don't wait for a "better time" that a launch might create. It won't. Your Mac is worth more today than it will be at any point after today, launch or no launch, because that's simply how depreciation works. It only moves one direction.
There's a South African wrinkle worth knowing too: new Apple hardware tends to land here later than in the US, and at a steeper rand price once it does, thanks to import costs and exchange rates. That gap doesn't make waiting smarter. It just means the new shiny thing costs more than the headline US price you saw on Twitter, which is one more reason not to build your selling decision around it.
The one good reason to actually wait
There is exactly one situation where waiting costs you nothing: you're still using your current Mac daily, you haven't decided to sell yet, and you're genuinely just curious what's next. Fair enough. Keep using it. But the moment you've actually decided you're done with it, timing the market like a day trader doesn't serve you. It just delays a number that was only ever going to get smaller.
Curious what a specific model tends to hold onto? Have a look at what we're paying for MacBook Pros or MacBook Airs right now, today, before anyone announces anything.