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Oy vey! Gross mischaracterizations of our hobby.

I'm trying to get over the guilty feeling of selling systems which I currently don't. I'm much more interested in collecting and displaying them than selling but that only drives the bank account one direction. On the other hand it's hard to price system cost as well. Despite a good deal here and there, there's an unseen cost of gas and any testing one does that raises the theoretical cost vs selling for the same deal it's found for. I'd feel bad though if I bought something for cheap and sold it for more vs tell someone if it's worth much more. I'm helping save systems yes so that's comforting. I have a really nice collection that even I under appreciate but need to get organized better and start figuring out how to display it more publicly without breaking the bank since it really just costs me money to even show off the collection at this point (drive somewhere, hotel/food, price of convention).

Anyway case in point, I tried to let a seller recently know in their warehouse that they had a few more valuable Apple IIs than others. Apparently someone else wasn't as nice and paid minimum for an Apple II original. I hadn't seen it last time I was there or I would have pulled it out for them. I mentioned it when I was there but I think it didn't click then until they realized afterwards what price difference it had. Despite that conversation I did see a plus walk out with a pile of systems (they're making money since these are mostly upgrades and old scrap from various companies) but certainly not what it could be. I try to let them know if there's anything too valuable there. A lot helps that I already have so many nice systems I'm not desperate to take advantage though I also can't afford to pay market prices lol.

Another gentleman had a box of (10?) HP 200LX systems that he wanted I think $80 for from a craigslist ad. I highly suggested he go through and either sell them in pairs or see which he can fix and let him know a working one can sell for $100 each on ebay. He had asked if I was interested in the box before he told me his asking price and I let him know I didn't have enough on me to be worth the sale. Then he let me know the price and yeah it was damn tempting, I'd love a 200 too but hopefully he made the most of it. I do think about checking in from time to time though :)

Regarding value though. Has anyone seen vintage computers decline yet? My main example of an Altair from the 90s to today has close to doubled or tripled in the closing prices lately. Perhaps that could fall out eventually but it doesn't seem like a bad investment if it had been made. Given I'd rather play with it and I'm still looking here and there, just can't really afford the price still regardless of the holding it's value condition.
 
I don't buy from them, but that doesn't make them not irritating. They already clog up the eBay listings and sometimes even dedicated vintage computer markets, and if reporting like this gets widespread, then there'll be even more of them...
 
One other thought, I probably have said this before....Don't sell something on the open market (you don't really know the buyer) for a price less than or equal to the scrap value. This way you're probably actually selling to a collector and not a scapper. This helps.
 
How would one know the scrap value though? I think if I had to memorize scrap values for my poor little systems a little part of me would die. Of course it's probably dying anyway from beer or something but it's the moral thought that counts.
 
Motherboards are like $3 a pound or something, CPUs with any gold content can hit $100 a lb. Scrappers are buying complete towers for like $4-5 with gold at $1600+ (so they might make a few bucks a tower ripping them apart). For the most part anything collectable is worth much more then scrap, but Pentium pros are $20 a CPU or something like that).

The way things work is if you list a computer for free or under $5 then a scrapper will get their hands on it and scrap it.
 
I think it's probably too late to get into vintage computers as an "investment". Prices for old 70s and 80s stuff shot up from around 2000 to 2005, but for the past five or so years I haven't seen an appreciable increase in sale prices for most things. I have seen a jump in people asking absurdly high prices though. If anybody thinks they can buy stuff now to sit on for later, they're probably a few years too late IMO. Unless they come across some stuff for free.
 
Mac and NeXT stuff went through the roof after Steve went TU. C64 stuff went up as well when the magic of the SID was rediscovered and most of the other 8-bit consoles and computers gained a stable resale value when the city of Portland released all the patients from the Hipster rehab center and they started breeding.
Everything else seems to follow by "if you stock it, they will buy" and people who don't know the value so they google it and find the above mentioned people and their prices and it branches from there.

I ran an experiment when I worked at The Hackery (because, screw you David) and flooded ebay with NuBus cards priced far below what everyone else was selling for and a lot of duplicate cards. Some stuff sold pretty fast but you found some stuff that sat for months with that price and eventually you found other sellers listing similar cards at lower than ebay average prices because they searched it up, saw our card and its lack of selling and priced theirs accordingly.
 
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Prices seem to have gone up over the last decade steadily with some blips here and there. Large amounts of computers old and new have been reycled and will continue to be recycled by the millions. Older items that are in collections seem to be safe from recycling (until the owner dies or has to move) but newer stuff goes straight to the recycling center so eventually it will be hard to find.

Nubus cards are hard to find cheap anymore (same with VLB), luckily I have a large collection. Some of the stuff I collect nobody else wants (old video capture cards), while I have a nice selection I can't see it being worth anything other then scrap value (not that I care).
 
2008-2012 saw a huge "dump" of vintage items onto the market and elsewhere, at least in my neck of the woods. Prices have stabilized a result of what very well may be the last great liberation of old tech (from 70-'80) I would not expect it to last. Prices will go up again in 2013.
 
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