21 Mar
2005
21 Mar
'05
9:50 a.m.
Just a few random comments:
- 'Rare' Mac128..
Twas not my intention to bring about a argument on the value of Macs - I simply
happned upon one while looking for the B&H AppleII and used it as an example - I
can site many examples of Ebay items which have gone fairly well over what I
consider to be a reasonable value for the item.
- While eBay prices are to be taken as a general mix
of legtimacy, ignorance,
greed, stupidity and outright scamming, Goodwill prices aren't that much more
'helpful' either. Unless they have a good 'picker' doing the pricing,
Goodwill
and their ilk have a mission to sell old junk for the cheap. We've all had
impossibly lucky finds at these places..
With anything as old and varied as the items we collect, price/value is really
in the eye of the beholder, and can vary all over the map. I happened to mention
Goodwill because it was the last place I picked up a Mac 128 (and it was a true
128) - Saw three of them go in a local newsgroup last year for under $20 each,
and could have used that example ... Also seen them go for much higher on Ebay ...
Very rarely do I see an item sell in local market for higher than Ebay, but very
often the other way around - I still assert that Ebay prices should be viewed
either with skepticism, or at least as a marker for the high end of the scale.
The sad truth is that much of the material that we value and collect is
considered worthless by the majority of people - many of the items in my
collection were donations, including some that I would place a decent $$$
value on - Ebay manages to reach enough people that somebody somewhere wants
it, and by virtue of the way it works, it sells at the highest price that
they are willing to pay (or at least just above the highest price that the
next bidder would have paid) - that doesn't mean that these prices are
indicitave of a reasonable average value for an item.
By the same token, Goodwill represents the lowest end of the scale (after all,
someone GAVE it to them) - the true average value for an item will probably
lie somewhere in between Goodwill and Ebay.
- My favorite eBay canard re: Macs is the "I
opened it up to have a look, and
it's SIGNED on the back cover!!!!". Of course, they are all signed up until the
Classic era (I think the sigs went away with the new case, but I could be wrong).
IIRC, the sigs were in the Original, Fat and the Plus, which are all essentially
the same plastics (with vents on top) - with the SE and forced air cooling, the
plastics changed and the sigs were dropped - Classics are the third style of small
mac plastics (also without sigs).
Regards,
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html