When an Impulse Buy Looks Right: I Bought a MacBook Pro the Day Before the Price Went Up

June 24, 2026, 7:13:52 a.m.

That is what the transaction history says. At that time, I bought a MacBook Pro on Coupang, the Korean commerce app. I did not start out trying to buy a MacBook for myself. I was originally looking for a computer to give to an employee.

A contract employee was joining in June and was expected to move into a full-time role in August. Naturally, that person needed a proper computer. Our work involves making video, opening a lot of files, keeping too many browser tabs alive, and now using AI tools almost constantly. If the equipment is slow, the work quietly becomes tiring.

So throughout June I told that person to let me know if they needed a MacBook or a Mac Studio. I said I would buy the right configuration, so they should look into what they wanted. They mostly said, “Yes, I will take a look,” and did not make a clear request. There was also some time off planned in July, so maybe there was no need to decide immediately.

The problem is that from then on, I started looking at MacBooks.

At first I really was looking for employee equipment. A few days later, I was looking harder than the employee. I opened Coupang, closed it, checked Apple’s site, closed it, and opened Coupang again. I looked at prices, memory, storage. Then I closed the page while thinking, “You already have several MacBooks. Why buy another one?”

I was looking for employee equipment, then wanted one myself

I already had a MacBook Pro M4 Max. I paid around $3,900 for it at the time, so the performance was more than fine. I also had two base-ish MacBook Pro M4 Pro machines. Those were bought for live streaming work, with 512 GB storage and 24 GB memory.

Before that I had used a MacBook Air too, but after long sessions, heat and throttling bothered me. That is why I had bought the basic M4 Pro models: even if the performance was not extreme, having a fan felt better.

When the employee joined, the situation became awkward. I temporarily handed over the M4 Max because it was the best machine I could give right away for video-related work. After that, what remained in my own hands was the basic M4 Pro.

Of course the M4 Pro is a good computer. This may sound spoiled. But because I use AI so heavily now, I kept feeling a little short of room. I would have multiple browser tabs open, a WordPress admin screen, Obsidian, image generation work, capture edits, and AI tools running beside everything else. None of those are huge on their own, but when they pile up, the machine begins to feel slightly constrained.

Storage kept bothering me too. You can live with 512 GB if you use external SSDs, cloud storage, and periodic cleanup. But paying attention to that all the time is annoying. I disliked the moment when I was working and suddenly wondered, “Is storage okay?”

So I started thinking that maybe I needed at least 1 TB. Maybe more memory too. If I am already using AI this much, I will probably use it more, not less.

By that point the purchase was almost done. I simply had not pressed the payment button yet.

June 24, 2026, 7:13:52 a.m.

For several days I looked, closed the page, looked again, and closed it again.

“You already have three MacBooks. Why buy another one?”

That thought was the loudest one, and it was correct. I already had enough. But the best one, the M4 Max, was with the employee. I still needed to buy employee equipment eventually. My own work had expanded. I wanted 1 TB. I wanted more memory.

Those sentences kept appearing in my head.

Honestly, it was less a rational decision than a process of attaching reasons to something I already wanted. But that is what made it ambiguous. It was not complete waste, but it was not a purchase I absolutely needed either.

Then I woke up on the morning of June 24. It was probably around 6:30 a.m., that strange time when going back to sleep and getting up both feel wrong. I lay in bed, looked at my phone without much thought, and opened Coupang again.

The page said it would arrive the same day if I ordered then.

That is dangerous. “Arrives today” does something odd to the mind. If I am going to buy it anyway, why not now? I had been looking for days. I had to think about employee equipment anyway. I had to change my work setup anyway. If I was going to buy it anyway.

So at 7:13:52 a.m. on June 24, 2026, I paid.

The price was about $2,510.

The funny part is that I did not open it right away after it arrived. When I was buying it, it felt urgent. Once it arrived, I suddenly became calm. I looked at the box and thought, “I really bought this.”

An impulse purchase feels different at payment time and arrival time. When paying, the item has already become necessary inside your head. When it arrives, the card bill becomes visible again. So I left the box unopened for a while.

The price went up the next day

The next night, or maybe early in the morning as June 25 turned into June 26, I saw a strange update on YouTube. A creator had posted that Apple MacBook prices had gone up.

At first I thought, “No way.” Still, I opened Coupang just in case.

The inventory that had seemed plentiful the day before was almost gone. The configurations I had been looking at were hard to find. The exact configuration I bought did not show up properly. Products that had been sitting there while I hesitated suddenly seemed to have disappeared.

That felt absurd. I had simply made an impulse purchase, but one day later I looked like someone who caught the last train.

A few days later, I clicked into the product page again. I remember the price being around $3,390. I had paid about $2,510, so the visible difference was roughly $845 to $910.

Of course, I would need to recheck the exact model name and configuration. The Coupang product page may have changed, and the options may not have been perfectly identical. But the feeling at the time was clear.

Ah, this really was the last train.

Until the day before, I had been arguing with myself. Is it okay to buy another MacBook when I already have one? Why am I buying my own equipment while looking for an employee’s? Is it sane to buy a roughly $2,510 laptop from bed in the morning? When the price rose a day later, all those questions suddenly became quieter.

The impulse purchase started to look less like an impulse and more like something I had avoided badly.

That is too convenient an interpretation, of course. The truth is simpler: I wanted it, watched it for days, used memory and storage as excuses, borrowed the employee-equipment reason, and bought it after waking up. The price increase came afterward.

Still, human feelings work like that. If the price rises the day after you buy something, the same purchase becomes slightly less embarrassing.

The impulse was not suddenly rational. The next day’s price simply made it easier to live with.

I told the employee too

A few days later, when the employee came to work, I brought it up.

“Did you see that MacBook prices went up?”

The employee looked surprised, so I opened Coupang again and showed them. I explained that the configurations visible the day before were gone, and similar ones were over $3,250. The employee was genuinely surprised.

So I said it.

“I bought mine the day before.”

I wanted to say that. It had been an impulse purchase, but after one day I could tell the story as if I had made a perfectly timed decision. The employee laughed and said it was amazing, and that they should have bought one too. I doubt it was serious regret. The situation was just funny.

But I did not stop there.

I remembered that the employee had recently been thinking about changing phones. So I said:

“Buy quickly if you are going to buy. If Samsung or Apple releases new phones in August or September, phones could go over $1,950 too. Just buy 1 TB, even if you do not need it.”

After saying that, I laughed at myself. A few days earlier I had been debating whether I could justify another MacBook when I already had three. Now I was telling someone else to buy 1 TB even if they did not need it.

Then I added one more line.

“It is not random that chip and memory stocks have gone up. AI is eating memory everywhere, so now the bill is coming to us too.”

I said it half jokingly, but I do think about this often. AI helps me a lot. I use it when organizing writing, touching the site, creating images, and fixing code. Work that would have taken days in the past can sometimes be finished in hours.

But watching device prices rise like this makes the future feel a little strange. If AI raises productivity, will some things eventually become cheaper? Or will the cost of data centers, semiconductors, memory, and electricity keep pushing prices upward?

I cannot present this as a serious economic forecast. It is closer to the feeling of one consumer who uses AI almost every day. I benefit from AI, and at the same time I am watching things become more expensive because of AI.

Before, news about Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, or storage companies going up felt like market news. This time it felt as if that story had entered my Coupang cart. When something that was about $2,510 one day appears around $3,390 a few days later, a distant story suddenly becomes close.

Anyway, I did not expect an impulse purchase to end up wrapped in this kind of story. Something worth recording happened to me too, although maybe it needs a question mark after the word “record.”

When I reread this later, I will probably think one of two things: “Good thing I bought it then,” or “There I was, persuading myself again.”

Both are possible. At least this time, the transaction timestamp remains.

June 24, 2026, 7:13:52 a.m. The moment the impulse purchase ended, and the moment that impulse began to feel slightly less embarrassing one day later.

Sometimes an impulse buy turns out to be right.

More precisely, sometimes there is a day when it looks right.