If you follow the rules to a T (ship only to confirmed U.S. addresses, ship with tracking, require a signature) you're covered in the eyes of PayPal.
I've probably sold 5 laptops and (easily) 10 phones for myself and friends on eBay.
Cover your bases, require PayPal and a confirmed address. Don't budge on these points and you'll be fine.
PROTIPS:
* Absolutely start with a $1 lowest bid, no reserve. The market will bring your laptop up to acceptable prices.
* Include as many words and pictures as you can in your description. I routinely just copy the specs from one of the tear-down sites for my exact model and paste them in. Buyers find comfort in knowing exactly what they're buying.
* Take as many hi-res pictures as you can. Don't worry about the scratch. Buyers find comfort in knowing exactly what they're buying.
* This is hugely overlooked: Make your auction end on a Friday or Saturday night around 11pm EST. This is when the nerds with money are sitting on their couch putzing around eBay looking for a new lappy.
Can you explain why you recommend passing on the reserve? Even if the product will sell for a price that the market considers acceptable 100% of the time, what is the harm in setting a reserve regardless?
This shows that you're serious and has raised the price people are willing to go for to about 90% of what I originally paid, which is pretty impressive when you consider that it's used.
- Only buy good products, like the Air. If Apple releases a
lemon, it’s not going to hold its value well.
- Buy at the start of a release cycle. It’s unlikely Apple will
replace one of its own products within a year.
- backup my files / projects
- destroy my personal files
- sell my old laptop to someone and hopefully get my money
- copy files to the new laptop
- set personal settings ( wallpaper, mouse speed etc )
- and optionally : get used to new keyboard layout
- hope for a fix if there is a some hardware/design error.
for programmers, i think old but working laptop seems fine to me.
after a while I spent a day improving the way I work, all of my code (and my configurations) are backed up to github as I work, I store personal stuff I actually want to keep on dropbox or an external drive
I stopped being afraid of moving computers (or more likely, my current computer dying), transitioning to a new computer would take me in the matter of minutes not days, and I dont have to worry about potentially losing files, now I regularly reformat my computer just to get the "fresh install" feel
Selling your old laptop is easy via Craigslist.
Copying files takes a few minutes with FireWire disk mode.
There is no separate step for "personal settings"; those are copied over when you copy your home directory over.
There is also almost never a new keyboard layout.
There is almost never a major hardware issue, either.
I don't think installing a fresh OS will remove personal data sufficiently. But maybe there is a setting to do a secure clean?
1) Swap in your old hard drive into the new machine
2) Copy hard drive over (dd even) and format
The only way you can keep this with the numbers given here is if you buy near the start of a release cycle and always sell before it ends. In order to do both, you have to both predict the release schedule well AND spend a month or more with no computer while you wait for the new release.
The numbers in the long run are weaker, since some of your purchases will invariably cross release cycle boundaries. Buying a new one every year may in fact cost less than buying a new one every 2 years (depending on the resell curve, which you do not know in advance). Regardless, it's certainly not such a clear win that you can insult the intelligence of everyone that doesn't behave this way.
However, this works VERY well with iPhones. I have had every iPhone starting with the 3G, and have upgraded each year. Both times, I have sold my previous phone on ebay for at least $100 MORE than the subsidized cost of my new one.
Are you paying the full price of the phone when you bought it? Or your cell plan paying part of it (subsidized)? In the later case, the sold phone is still being paid until the cell plan finishes.
Or have a desktop computer too.
I value longevity and durability in products I buy. It's nice to pick a machine and stick with it. It's a long-term companion. It's about slowing "disposable computing's" cycle of production and obsolescence. It feels good to prove that, with a few upgrades over its lifetime, a well-engineered product can be useful -- even as a primary computer -- for years to come.
My Spring 2008 MacBook Pro (http://cl.ly/2H1l2X1Q2w181Z2P1Y3P) will be three years old this Saturday, and I couldn't be happier with it. My previous machine was a 15" PowerBook G4 purchased in 2004. Both have been fantastic primary computers. An occasional upgrade and maintenance can make all the difference in extending the useful lifespan of a machine.
A few months in, I maxed out the memory to 4GB, which is still sufficient despite running our entire stack and an IDE or VM. Last summer, I replaced the 7200RPM drive with a 160GB X25-M. A few months ago, I added a second 48GB SSD drive via the ExpressCard slot to regain a bit of the storage sacrificed by choosing a faster drive. Over the three-year lifetime of the machine (so far), these upgrades cost about $625.
During that time, the manufacturer has also done a great job standing behind the laptop, replacing the keyboard/top case, one battery, and one power adapter. I'll take it in for one last servicing before the warranty runs out (to fix an unreliable Caps Lock key and clean the DVD-RW drive I never use), and may purchase one more battery at some point. Aside from this, it's in perfect condition and plenty fast enough for Java/Scala/Python/Ruby/Android development and testing.
This computer's followed me from the week I graduated college as an aspiring freelancer through three years of building a career in software engineering. It's got some life in it yet.
It may even be true that he's helping the environment by allowing more people to buy longer lasting machines.
Only very slightly. He's selling it for almost the same price he bought it for, but happens to have a student discount that makes it 15% cheaper.
That combined with resale make this kit very attractive to their customer base who can instantly choose to be in your camp or the author's camp.
On the other hand, the market probably doesn't value modifications or add-ons as well, so re-selling my year-old MBP with optical replaced by SSD, 750GB 7200RPM rust platter, and 8GB RAM would probably not be "cost effective".
From this perspective it's a shame that lowest-spec Mac Mini is more expensive than the previous generation. The 'white' Mac Mini sold for 499 Euro in The Netherlands, while the aluminum Mini is 699 Euro. This excludes many families with a lower income.
In the PC world your pricing competes against every manufacturer. So HP has to push their prices down on next rev.
Whereas no one else can make an Apple computer. They can set a price and keep it fixed for a year. There's no knockoffs that can undercut them.
I concluded that the resale price is too low for such good-quality and durable hardware that I decided I'd rather give my older hardware to family or friends for free or a small compensation. Making someone happy with a good MacBook or Mac Mini is worth more.
Load it up with expensive software and you will earn a higher resale value.
Edit: Added after the jrockway and tylerhowath replied, but didn't want to reply to both:
From the Apple Sales and Refund Policy… Purchases from the Apple Store for Education Individuals are not for institutional purchase or resale.
I presume the same applies to the in store discount. Apple has enough lawyers to cross that "t".
About a month ago I broke from that pattern and bought an 11" Air (right after the new Macbook Pros came out, and pretty far into the current cycle for the Air's). It was the first time that the new machine was way less powerful than the old one (also, so far, the best machine I've ever had).
Usually I'd sell my old laptop for about 66% of the price of the new one. Originally, I sold them on Ebay, but it got to be a pain in the ass dealing with people there (I had one guy complain after buying a Macbook Pro from me that the screen had smudges on it. Not marks mind you, but "easilly wiped off with a rag smudges".)
After that I started selling them either to friends or on craigslist.
I got my first Mac this year and I have to acknowledge, this company earned their high profit margins very well.
Oh, and I agree with the other posters. You can not, as the author suggests, sell before a new release, if you need a computer all the time. He switched the product line, from a Pro to an Air, so this might be the reason why he has overseen this problem.
Are the people buying used, at a student discount price, really getting a machine of that value? If it's out of warranty, any small hardware problem means disposal.
Apple certainly has a strong brand with high perceived reliability. That's not value. Here's the rub: Warranty extends to the expected life of the machine, set by the producer of said product.
Everything else is brand loyalty.
It's a one-off big investment, but from then on he had a new bike every year, practically free.
Could be good for students. Not sure about anyone else. And it reeks of a parasitic mindset (suggestion to ask a student to do the purchase to take advantage of their discount or import a US laptop without paying duties/sales tax)
Funny story- I was on vacation and I had a software problem that caused custom made software crash. An urgent need for a big client made a trip to the applestore to buy a new laptop the most logical move- it was already installed. It took an hour for the purchase (trip included), 20 minutes to install the software, do what was required and provide the results. The client got its result 1 hour + 20 minutes after its call.
And that paid for this laptop and a good leftover, not including the great experience for the client who knows that wherever you are, you will deliver on time.