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Is there still a secondhand market for Intel Macs?
- Thread starter dawnrazor
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Well after my listing creating zero traction I got two offers this week, the first was too low but the second was much better and meant I walked away with about 35% of the purchase price (RAM) included…
However two things hurt me on this sale. As noted the 4TB hard drive, I should have bought a 2TB drive at the time of purchase, they would have made it cheaper and not effected resale price at all… Secondly the RAM, whilst I needed the 128G of RAM whilst I was using it I really should have been on the look out for cheap 32G of RAM that I could have swapped in at the time of sale and sold the 128G separately… The transition to Apple Silicon definitely has impacted the secondhand market, which is tough news for anyone like me that ‘had’ to sell a relatively new Intel computer, as has been mentioned the best thing would have been to keep it, but I literally had no use or place for it and couldn’t wear any more depreciation… so it made sense financially to get as much out of it as I could, especially with rumours of a Silicon 30” iMac swirling about.
I bought this machine as a stop gap machine back in 2021 - I very nearly bought an Intel Mac Pro… now that would have been disastrous in hindsight… or actually I’d still be using it and would be unable to sell it for anything near what I needed to get back out of it… So I regard that as a bullet dodged. The iMac at this spec was the ext option that could handle the work I was going to throw at it and it was replacing a 2017 model that just wasn’t cutting it anymore and it was the best option at the time, once the M1 Ultra MS was announced I nearly bought one of those, but I’m glad I didn’t as the GPU improvements in the M2 Ultra have been worth the wait…
I don’t plan upgrading any computers for several years 😂
However two things hurt me on this sale. As noted the 4TB hard drive, I should have bought a 2TB drive at the time of purchase, they would have made it cheaper and not effected resale price at all… Secondly the RAM, whilst I needed the 128G of RAM whilst I was using it I really should have been on the look out for cheap 32G of RAM that I could have swapped in at the time of sale and sold the 128G separately… The transition to Apple Silicon definitely has impacted the secondhand market, which is tough news for anyone like me that ‘had’ to sell a relatively new Intel computer, as has been mentioned the best thing would have been to keep it, but I literally had no use or place for it and couldn’t wear any more depreciation… so it made sense financially to get as much out of it as I could, especially with rumours of a Silicon 30” iMac swirling about.
I bought this machine as a stop gap machine back in 2021 - I very nearly bought an Intel Mac Pro… now that would have been disastrous in hindsight… or actually I’d still be using it and would be unable to sell it for anything near what I needed to get back out of it… So I regard that as a bullet dodged. The iMac at this spec was the ext option that could handle the work I was going to throw at it and it was replacing a 2017 model that just wasn’t cutting it anymore and it was the best option at the time, once the M1 Ultra MS was announced I nearly bought one of those, but I’m glad I didn’t as the GPU improvements in the M2 Ultra have been worth the wait…
I don’t plan upgrading any computers for several years 😂
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I empathize. I bought my first Mac PowerBook G4 in 2005. A few months later, Jobs made his Intel announcement. I had it for less than 3 years.
Mac Studio M2 Ultra and yeah I maxed that puppy out too… only a 2TB SSD though 😂 but I did get an Apple Studio Monitor as well… so I am a bit of a sucker for the new stuff…
have to say the MS is going to work very well for me… I rendered out a 3minute video to 422HQ HD pro res today and it took 15 seconds… the iMac would have been more like a minute and a half maybe…