Do Electronics Prices in Lebanon Drop if You Wait? Three Months of Same-Shop Prices
"Wait, it will get cheaper" is common advice for tech. To test it for Lebanon, we took every new listing that we recorded at the same shop in both the first week of August 2026 and the first week of November 2026, and compared the two prices. That gave us 31,978 listings: the same product, at the same shop, three months apart. Most prices did not change at all. For laptops, phones, tablets and consoles, a price was two to four times more likely to have gone up than down. TVs were the one big category where waiting paid more often than it cost.
How we compared
For each listing we took its median recorded price in the week of 3 to 9 August 2026 and in the week of 1 to 7 November 2026. A change of half a percent or less either way counts as unchanged. We kept new units only, priced at $20 or more, and dropped the few pairs where the price rose by more than 150% or fell by more than 60%, which we treat as listing errors rather than price changes.
Comparing the same listing removes the noise of new shops and new models arriving. It has one blind spot: a listing that sold out or was removed between August and November is not in the data. If the cheapest units sold first, the real picture for buyers is a little worse than the one below.
What happened to prices between August and November
"Typical drop" and "typical rise" are the median change among the listings that went down or up.
| Category | Listings | Went down | Unchanged | Went up | Typical drop | Typical rise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laptops | 3,205 | 8.6% | 66.0% | 25.5% | -5.7% | +6.8% |
| Phones | 2,316 | 9.1% | 69.0% | 21.9% | -4.8% | +8.9% |
| Tablets | 1,240 | 7.5% | 64.2% | 28.3% | -3.3% | +6.5% |
| TVs | 924 | 21.0% | 65.3% | 13.7% | -7.9% | +6.9% |
| Monitors | 1,126 | 5.9% | 90.5% | 3.6% | -4.5% | +6.6% |
| Consoles | 275 | 11.3% | 57.8% | 30.9% | -3.4% | +9.9% |
| Audio | 5,477 | 5.1% | 92.0% | 2.9% | -8.6% | +8.7% |
| Home appliances | 17,281 | 7.5% | 77.9% | 14.7% | -10.0% | +11.1% |
| All categories | 31,978 | 7.6% | 77.9% | 14.5% | -8.0% | +9.6% |
Laptops, phones and tablets: waiting cost more often than it saved
Two thirds of laptop prices were the same in November as in August. Of the third that moved, three in four went up. One laptop listing in four was dearer after three months, typically by 6.8%. On a $900 laptop that is about $60. Only one in twelve got cheaper.
Phones and tablets followed the same pattern. Phone prices rose for 21.9% of listings and fell for 9.1%. Tablets rose for 28.3% and fell for 7.5%, and when a tablet did get cheaper, the drop was small, 3.3% in the middle case. Consoles had the most movement of any category, and 31% of console listings went up.
Listings cannot tell us why. Shops do not explain their price changes, and we would rather not guess at import costs or supply. What the data does say is that, over this period, the price in front of you was more likely to rise than to fall.
TVs: the one place waiting paid
TVs were different. 21% of TV listings got cheaper between August and November, against 13.7% that got dearer, and the typical drop was 7.9%, the largest among laptops, phones, tablets, TVs, monitors and consoles. On a $935 TV, which is about the median cheapest price for a TV that three or more shops sell, that is around $74. If you are buying a TV and are not in a hurry, keeping an eye on the price for a few weeks has a real chance of paying off.
Monitors and audio: prices that stand still
Nine out of ten monitor and audio prices did not move at all in three months. Waiting changes nothing there. The saving in those categories is not in timing but in choosing the shop: the same headphones vary by 43% between the cheapest and dearest shop, as we found in our category comparison.
A few products we follow closely
These are the cheapest new prices any Lebanese shop listed in the week of 3 August and in the first week of November 2026, as listed, before any VAT a shop adds at checkout. They describe the whole market, not one shop, and the set of shops LebTech covers grew in October, so read them alongside the table rather than instead of it.
- Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra 256GB: $1,166 in August, $1,145 in November.
- iPhone 17 Pro Max 256GB: $1,400 in August, $1,400 in November.
- iPhone 17 256GB: $893 in August, $870 in November.
- Nintendo Switch 2: $500 in August, $489 in November.
- Samsung Galaxy A57 256GB: $437 in August, $460 in November.
- MacBook Air 13-inch M5, 16GB/512GB: $1,199 in August, $1,249 in November.
What this means if you are deciding now
If you need a laptop, phone or tablet and have found a fair price, there is no pattern in our data saying a better one is coming. Comparing shops today saves more, and more reliably, than waiting. For a TV, waiting a few weeks is a reasonable bet. Our window ends on 7 November, before Black Friday and end-of-year promotions, so it says nothing about those. When they arrive, check a promotion against the price history on the product page rather than against the shop's own crossed-out price.
Compare the exact same laptop across every Lebanese shop
LebTech shows you the cheapest price for the model you want, updated daily, in USD.
Browse laptops →Keep reading
Last updated November 2026 · LebTech