iBook G4: from computer to doorstop

July 24, 2006 11:11 AM

From iBook to MacBook.

I see (on eBay and elsewhere) that it's still possible to sell a G4 iBook for a not-yet-embarrassingly-small amount of money. Since I'm planning to eventually sell mine (10.3.9, a second battery, AirPort Extreme, Photoshop CS, Office, Toast 7 + a good Logitech webcam and a Lacie DVD burner) and use those few hundreds of dollars to make the upgrade to a MacBook less painful, but I'm not in a hurry, I'd like to know: for how long can I still keep the iBook before its market value becomes equal to a plastic doorstop? Thanks.

posted by matteo to computers & internet (6 answers total)

That's hard to say. Although Apple has gone through one major hardware shift in the past (68K to PowerPC), we didn't have widespread use of ebay and craigslist at the time.

The best you could do would be to work it out indirectly. Find older iBooks that are selling for 1/2 what you could get for yours now, and note how old they are. Let's say they're 2 years older than yours. This suggests the "value half-life" of your iBook is 2 years.

There are a lot of assumptions in there, and it really doesn't account for how different the Macbooks are and how they upset the equation, but forecasting like this seems pretty tricky.
posted by adamrice at 11:25 AM on July 24, 2006

I think that your laptop will keep its current equlibrium value (whatever that is as an aggregate average of all laptops with your specs on Ebay, Craigslist, etc) until one of four things occur:

1) Leopard is released.
2) MacBook Rev. B is released.
3) Your AppleCare expires.
4) You drop it.

As soon as either #1 or #2 occur, your laptop will find a new equilibrium point. Point #3 is a continually depreciating part of your laptop. Point #4 is self-explanatory. My advice is to sell prior to any of these things occuring if your intent is to trade up to the next MacBook and get the most money. (Although, IMHO, considering that most of your major "money software" is PPC right now, trading up to a MacBook seems to be a waste of money; I would wait until you were ready to purchase new copies of Universal software before making any decisions.)
posted by SeizeTheDay at 11:33 AM on July 24, 2006

And remember, the software titles you mention can only be legally sold with the laptop if you fully transfer the licenses - that means that you can't keep a copy and sell it on your laptop.
posted by cptnrandy at 11:39 AM on July 24, 2006

A couple other factors to consider will be the overall speed of introduction of newer, more powerful and perhaps even cheaper MacIntel hw; as supply of these computers increases resale prices on the G4 hw will naturally decline.

On the sw side the overall driver will be if Apple (or someone else) creates a compelling reason for G4 users to switch en masse; Parallels may be that reason - it's looking pretty damn good, letting you run OS X, XP, Linux, etc, etc simultaneously and on the same hw.

Of course the biggest driver of all will be Apples commitment (or lack of) to OS X on PowerPC; the day the announce they won't be offering OS X updgrades on the Morotola chip base anylonger you'll see a sharp decline in value (well, not immediately, but you get my point).

I'm in the same boat, two G4 PowerBooks and FWIW, I'm planning to migrate in one year tops. I'm also dumping a venerable G3 iMac that's served as my primary living room computer / DVD / Music entertainment centre since 2000 sometime in the next three months for a Mac Mini. The little box will let me "ease into" to Universal Binary world, and make migrtation of my more heavily used, portables easier.

Of course the ultimate value of the computer is your usage; I've also got two G3 iBooks (Clamshell); one I use as a Print Server (it lives in the closet with my printer, accessed via 802.11b), and the other is a "guest" computer when GalPal stays over. I'll keep each until they won't boot any longer.
posted by Mutant at 11:41 AM on July 24, 2006

Of course the biggest driver of all will be Apples commitment (or lack of) to OS X on PowerPC; the day the announce they won't be offering OS X updgrades on the Morotola chip base anylonger you'll see a sharp decline in value (well, not immediately, but you get my point).

That's not how it will happen. They'll drop support gradually, model by model. The oldest Macs supported by Tiger are seven years old, and likely to be dropped when Leopard comes out later this year. Apple may try to compress that timeframe to accelerate migration to Intel, but it will still be five years, easily, before the last G4 iBooks are dropped. By that time, their resale value will have vanished anyway.
posted by jjg at 12:26 PM on July 24, 2006

I sold my iBook and used the proceeds for a 12" powerbook, and then the powerbook for a Lenovo N100.

The iBook I sold after about a year, the powerbook almost two years.

The more state-of-the-art the hardware at the time, the longer lead time.

The iBook went for $800 - as did the Powerbook - when I sold them. It was a G3 iBook 800 and a G4 PowerBook 867.
posted by jimmy0x52 at 12:29 PM on July 24, 2006