I just bought a brand new in box Performa 6116cd, it as $450 but it was so close to my first Mac I had to buy it. I opened it up and it didn't get video (needs new PRAM battery). Here is a picture of the machine unboxed for the first time in 20 years!
I have a couple new Macs. Always seems odd that a machine would remained boxed all this time. I would guess these were maybe bought by a school or large firm at one time and not put into play. Then they just sat in some corner.
Either way, its cool these are still out there. At the same time, its scary given how PRAM batteries can explode.
It's possible that an institution bought it as a spare that never needed to be deployed, or that it just sat around in a store for a while, before just being put somewhere, after it was essentially too old to be sold any longer.
Yeah, the story goes that there was a women who was obsessed with buying things but not actually using them bought this machine and stored it since new. I won't replace the capacitors as I have never seen a failed capacitor on any early PPC machine. But I do have a spare NOS logic board just in case. I am trying to find a nice new 68k machine, but that is proving rather hard.
I have a spare NIB Mac mini (mid-2011) that was purchased with the 26 minis deployed in my computer lab/classroom. Unless something evil occurs to one of those 26 in the next two years, it will be retired, unused, and could easily wind up in our basement for a few decades. (Granted, it is only a $600 computer.) Its entire role is to be a spare tire. I can't teach a 26-student Adobe Creative Cloud class without 26 functional workstations. At least that was the logic four summers ago. So far, it has been unnecessary, but that doesn't make it a crazy waste.