Best place to sell laptop or laptop parts NYC mac

April 20, 2013 5:16 PM

My girlfriend is looking to sell an Intel Mac for parts or whole.

It's 10 years old, it currently has a damaged power line into the battery, but the screen, processor and hard drive are still good. Battery won't charge anymore and the genius bar suggested that it has a limited life left running off of just charging cord. She's looking to sell this in parts or whole and put the money towards a new machine. So we're looking for the best potential options for selling either for parts or whole, in New York City. She's looked at a few of the repair shops around the city, but none have gotten back to her. Tekserve's quote was pretty low. Are ebay and craigslist our best options? I realize this question has been asked beforebut not recently, looking for best place or way tot get a fair price.

posted by edbles to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: Craigslist is definitely the best option. You will get horrifically lowballed on eBay since people can't inspect anything "as is" and damaged in person, and you'll also have to deal with people who are huge cocks about buying a partially broken computer("there's this little scratch you didn't mention despite saying the entire outside is severely scuffed and showing a bunch of photos, I want $40 refunded or I'm filing an eBay case!"). I only put totally dead machines for parts on there anymore really. They also hit you with basically 10% in fees which is ridiculous.

If it boots and runs put it up on Craigslist for $200. Someone will probably buy it within a day, especially in a big city.
posted by emptythought at 5:31 PM on April 20, 2013

Tekserve's quote was pretty low

Define pretty low? I can't imagine a very large offer for a decade-old system that's only basically only useful to scavenge for spare parts for other decade-old systems.
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:38 PM on April 20, 2013

Craigslist is by far the best option for selling old hardware. But honestly that thing is a piece of junk. While the processor, screen, and hard drive might work, they're not in good shape - they're 10 years old. You're not going to get much money from anyone.
posted by Ookseer at 5:53 PM on April 20, 2013

Response by poster: $35 from tekserve. It looks like people are getting $150 on the ebay for similarly specced models.
posted by edbles at 5:56 PM on April 20, 2013

Ookseer has it right - both on the Craigslist aspect and the value. Not only are the parts 6-7 years old (Apple started using Intel processors in 2006) but in a laptop, the only swappable parts are the hard drive and memory - neither of which is very impressive (probably 60-80 Gb drive, 1-2 Gb RAM). You can get a brand new 60Gb laptop drive for $35 on amazon, and 2Gb of memory for $15.

I know because I have a similar system. There's really not much value there. Sorry.
posted by neilbert at 6:23 PM on April 20, 2013

Craigslist it for parts, but don't include the hard drive.

Pull the drive beforehand, and either keep it or destroy it.
posted by mhoye at 6:35 PM on April 20, 2013

Whole is best. If you want to wipe the drive and render your data unreadable, use Darik's Boot and Nuke. It's not auditable wiping, but it's damn effective. It'll take at least an overnight to do a major wipe, though.

That the harddrive still works doesn't mean it isn't well beyond its lifespan. Any drive with normal daily usage over 5 years should be considered ripe for the dying. Plus, a 10-year-old laptop drive is probably too small to sell for anything. Between that and your data, I'd scrap it, or pull it out and use it as a low-trust storage drive with an external HDD enclosure. Don't put anything unique on it you're not prepared to lose forever.

The memory is your best bet-- old memory can even go up in value for being rare because of compatibility not extending to new memory, or maybe it has an older form-factor. Someone has the same computer you do and wants to keep it alive a little longer.
posted by Sunburnt at 8:03 PM on April 20, 2013

There are no 10-year-old Intel-based Macs. Apple switched to Intel chips in 2006. Which Mac are we *actually* discussing here?
posted by Wild_Eep at 1:18 PM on April 21, 2013

Response by poster: 10 years was the number given to me by the machines owner in passing. It's definitely an Intel mac so lets say it's 7 years old.
posted by edbles at 5:49 AM on April 24, 2013

Response by poster: We plan the nuke the drive. We will go the craigslist route first and see if anyone bites and then send it out to pasture on ebay.
posted by edbles at 5:50 AM on April 24, 2013