The Apple (Used) Premium?

I'm a <i>huge</i> fan of Apple's refurb store. But it can be a cat-and-mouse game because as stuff comes in and out of stock, the website will change minute by minute.<p>There is a site called refurb-tracker.com that puts out an RSS feed based on changes to the store inventory. I used some tool to turn that into a twitter feed @MacRefurb.<p>It's been running so long I don't even remember how to log in and change it. And I forget what tool I used to make the RSS-&#62;twitter conversion. But I still have 185 followers, 4 years later...

I was delighted when Apple announced the Retina MBP; I suspected it would mean year-old laptops might hit eBay at silly prices as some folks scrambled to upgrade.<p>I was right, and have picked up two this month (one on behalf of a friend):<p>- A MacBook Pro 15" 2.3 i7 Quad Core unibody, antiglare. (Sold for £908, cost in March 2011 £2,169. 58% saving.)<p>- A MacBook Pro 15" 2.0 i7 Quad Core unibody, 8GB RAM, antiglare. (Sold for £950, cost in 2011 approx £1,500. 37% saving.)<p>Both of these represent considerable savings over the 17% median for a used model stated in the article.<p>Both laptops can be user-upgraded with a 512 SSD (approx £300 from Crucial) and up to 16GB of RAM (approx £100), even though Apple's advertised maximum is 8GB of RAM for 2011 MacBook Pros. Their Geekbench scores are pretty close to the latest i7 chips in the Retina MacBook Pros.<p>Although they're out of warranty, the savings and the relative reliability of nearly new Apple hardware makes these excellent value for money, in my view. And they're not atypical of finishing prices for this sort of kit in Britain at present; average selling prices are only £100-£150 higher. I got a good price by finding auctions with average photos or formatting that were listed with awkward finishing times (typical commuter home time/very early in the morning).<p>Is there a premium for used Apple kit? Well, sure -- even the old ones are desirable. But that doesn't mean you have to pay it.

I noticed these guys seem to scrape Craigslist for data. I wonder what Craigslist thinks of that. Will they be the next helpful start-up killed by Craig?

I usually buy refurbished to save money, and I'm always surprised how negatively people react when they find that out. I'm under the impression manufacturers very thoroughly test refurbished products (after all, they know part of it was broken!); it makes me wonder if on average refurbished might be in even better condition than new.

I'm kinda surprised that this article doesn't consider extra costs, like taxes and (if in CA), recycling fee. When you're buying things that cost around $1200 (macbook air), you'll "save" around $200 by buying on craigslist.

This information inexplicably rarely comes up when people complain about the price of Apple products. I usually get 80 cents on the dollar for Apple notebooks but can't even give away a Windows machine. This makes it a no-brainer to buy Apple.

I bought an iPhone 4S from eBay.<p>Back here, you can exchange your iPhone with a minor excuse (3G intermittently working etc.) so the owner of the used phone exchanged it from the vendor for a brand new one at no cost. Therefore, I got a brand new iPhone 4S at the price of an iPhone4 with an Apple Care Protection plan. The only "used" part of the phone are the 19 pin connector, the earphones and the adaptor which personally doesn't quite keep me awake at nights.

You pay a premium over refurbished to buy a used Air? I'm I reading the last graph right?

By the time these models are buyable as refurbs they are also on amazon for a similar price.