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To figure out what 68k Mac's you can buy for low$ (2013)

uniserver

Well-known member
So far this is what I found:

What's available, out there in the wild (for a reasonable price)

Macintosh SE - $9.99

mac-se-208.jpg.2046765bbe76b34eb78991a46980c58b.jpg


http://lowendmac.com/compact/macintosh-se.html

LC I - $29

lc-with-12-inch-color-224.jpg.a212d0abb3af9acf6057ca18e608a2c7.jpg


http://lowendmac.com/lc/macintosh-lc.html

Centris 610 - $29

cq-610-192.jpg.f64a02e5736ba2ea8ff6c3c4f17f996f.jpg


http://lowendmac.com/quadra/centris-610.html

(Some of these numbers might be starting bids)

Obviously if we do not mention the source, we can talk about price all we want!

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
These machines are twenty years old and pricing on them is literally subject to the daily whims of children and collectors, and the supply is by no means "steady" at this point -- that's up to institutions that held onto them and just now want to get rid of them, individuals who previously collected them wanting to move on or lighten the load, or home users who bought them new doing the same.

There's realistically no way at this point you can say "the average price of an SE is $10" -- and even if you did compile a huge list of comps and assembled a moving average price projection using some statistics software (or Excel and plug-ins, or Excel and some know-how) then the list wouldn't be useful as a guarantee that somebody will be able to find $MACHINE at $SPECIFIC_PRICE_POINT.

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Agreed Cory - it has been quite a while since I've seen an SE on eBay.au at least, for less than say...$50 - $80. Even the ones that start out low tend to go for high prices...its all to do with the fact that these machines aren't getting any more common.

 

RickNel

Well-known member
The other factor is freight, particularly if you live in a place like Australia where the cities are far apart and the whole market is fairly small. I have to add $40-100 for freight to the cost of any machine outside my home town. Postage or freight from USA for a 68k logic board will be usually be $40-70.

Rick

 

Scott Baret

Well-known member
Don't forget geographic factors. Let's use the Mac ED as an example. One of our MLAers just acquired one, but he lives in Holland, where they're fairly common. In the States, the best way to get an ED is to actually import one from Holland or some other country where they're more plentiful (if one did show up, you can bet it would sell for an inflated price). My ED is a Dutch computer that cost well over $100 US to import.

 

krye

Well-known member
I check eBay several times a day and I can say the "average" price of a classic Mac is $100 bucks. I just checked, stopped counting at 22, but all but one are over $100. Sure, you can find units for $50, but they usually have a problem (or no keyboard/mouse). More often than not, SEs, Pluses, etc are posted for $200, $300, $400 dollars. Not to mention, the ones you might find under $100, you usually have to pay a good $30-$40 bucks for S/H. So you end up paying $100 anyway for a broken Mac.

 

tecneeq

Well-known member
Don't forget that the prices at Ebay are usually prices that are based on fantasy value. For example, a working Classic 4/40 started at 1 Euro goes for about 60 Euros. sometimes up to 120 Euros when it looks Retr0brighted. Then there are the Classics that are offered without auction for 250 to 350 Euros. But i highly doubt those get sold at all. I'm not sure what it cost to put something on ebay that doesn't sell, but i guess it's fairly low.

However, if you want to get started, just look at other sources where the prices aren't spoiled by people that sell to a fantasy collectors market. Or look out for classic auctions and try again and again, sometimes you still get lucky with 68k macs that are considered to be less desireable.

 

James1095

Well-known member
The only prices that matter on ebay are the final hammer price on completed auctions. There is a huge amount of vintage computer gear listed at fantasy prices that just gets listed over and over with no bids. You can't look at those to determine the value of an item any more than you can go by the starting bid. When I sell stuff on ebay, I almost always start it at 99 cents and let the interested bidders duke it out. Most items seem to receive a few low bids early on, but the real action doesn't take place until the final hours. Final prices are all over the place too, you might see a really nice item go for $50, then a week later an identical item in much worse condition goes for $250 or vice versa.

For what it's worth, the cheapest 68K Macs tend to be the stuff that was prolific in schools and the lower end consumer stuff like the Performas and such.

 

Scott Baret

Well-known member
I've bought several compacts and a IIcx in the past six months. All have been run-of-the-mill models (no Color Classics, SE/30s, etc; we won't count the 128K since it was free).

In one lot, I paid $20 for a pair of Macs--a Classic and a Plus. Both worked and had some upgrades (storage, RAM). That comes out to $10 per Mac plus some goodies.

In another, I paid $70 for an SE with a dead hard drive and 1MB RAM.

The others--an SE for $50 with an Ethernet card and a dead hard drive, $15 for a dead IIcx with a monitor, another SE for $20 with dual floppies.

Last year, I paid $50 for a Classic and $50 for another Classic. Both had upgraded RAM and working hard drives.

The only other old Mac I've bought since Steve Jobs died (which is when prices went up) was an LCIII with a monitor (but also squealing issues) for $25. This was late 2011.

In 2011, pre-Jobs death, I paid $70 for a lot of Macs which included two Centrises (610 and 650), a Quadra 700, an LCIII, two SEs, a IIvx, and a Plus. This was a STEAL, even if one of the SEs was parts-only and the LCIII had a dead HD. However, the parts SE had a Dove 030 inside!!! Every now and then lots like this will show up, but they aren't common anymore.

In other news, I need to quit buying so many old Macs. Counting parts and software, I have spent $245 on old Macs so far this year. I'll swap someone for a 12" RGB or buy a copy of Carmen Europe for Mac this year, but that will be it!!! (Of course, I may also need to pick up more PRAM batteries soon, but that's just routine stuff...)

 

Schmoburger

Well-known member
Man reading this makes me glad I held onto my collection for the past 14 years...

I have a bench in my shed that literally looks something like this ---->> :?: :?: :?: :?: :?: :?: :?: hehehe

Funny thing is, back when I got them, ya couldnt give em away... the only things that were worth any for collectible value were the 128k, the Lisa, the early Apple II's, and some of the various limited editions, freaks and flops... things like the Mac TV, the SE/30, the Color Classic, the Directors Edition 5xxx Powermacs, the 20A Mac etc... Hell, 512k's werent even considered valuable, they were just hard to get cos most had been thrown in the bin or locked in cupboards for 15 years and forgotten about... If ya stumbled across one tho, chances are the owner would practically throw it at you and send you on your way with a stack 3 ft high of software and peripherals.... Hell, I've had 3 512k's, still have 2 of them, and not one cost me a cent. All up there would be over 50 machines in my collection, and excluding the G4, G3, and a couple of others I paid top dollar for as daily hardware when they were near new, they would owe me at an estimate, $200-$250 over a space of the last 12 and a half years.

It's strange how times have changed....

 

uniserver

Well-known member
I agree, it is strange how things have changed.

Just like at the U of M Property Disposition, The dumpster out back in 1998-99 was always filled with SE/30's and II's / SE's / Quadra's etc.

They all had NIC cards, and were probably loaded up with ram.

 

Schmoburger

Well-known member
Mmmmmm me and a mate of mine who was actually a fairly well-known entity on MAF back in the day, we used to be keen on the old high-school dumpster intercept. There would literally be dozens of 68k macs, Powermacs, etc that if they had the slightest issue, or were too old to be reasonabley expected to be sold, that would simply get heaped into the skip. Early in the piece when I first started high school, there was one of a number of periodic tech sales in the school library and there were literally benches lined with Classics, Classic II's, Pluses, and SE's, and stacks and stacks of obsolete pizzabox LC's. some had token $20 buck pricetags on them for complete working units with peripherals... and non working units anywhere between there and nothing. There were stacks of perpherals and old-tech stuff... was a modern-day collectors dream. Thats actually where i came into posession of all my localtalk gear. Was a whole lot of fun for a 13 year old Mac dude. :)

They did that again maybe twice... first they opted to sell most of the PM5500/225's that had brrn replaced with new slotload iMacs in staffrooms, for around 250 bucks which back then was more than reasonable, boxed up with a clean install of OS8 and some software and whatnot. I bought one and had great fun playing with it til the FBT funked out. then probably 2 years after that, they had the final old Mac sell-off, this time selling off the first lot trayload iMacs to come into the school (which were brand new when I started there), and the unused beige Powermac desktops... Me and my friend tendered some piffling some, was like a hundred bucks between us and walked away with the lot. asnd split em up evenly. :D Not long after that the remaining beige hardware in the school that found its way to the surface one day ended up n the dumpster one bit at a time, which then set the precedent... next went the last of the trayloads, then the early slotloads, then the last of the slotloads just recently... straight into the trash.

 

Quadraman

Well-known member
Shipping will be a deal killer for many older Macs. Unless you're buying something really rare and valuable, it's not worth it.

 

BlastoiseBlue

Well-known member
I almost had complete, working Plus with a printer as a swap for my DualUSB but the two hour drive killed that deal, and I once almost had two G4 towers for $10 each.

I think generally people overprice Macs because they think they can fool less intelligent people into thinking a ten year old machine is a supercomputer, in fact that's sort of kind of not really what happened when I bought my first, the DualUSB G3. People spend their entire lives on Windows and then they get curious... "What's this whole Mac thing like?" they say to themselves, "I bet it's completely different!" they say, "such a large, vocal fanbase can't be wrong!"! Then they drop their entire summer paycheck on a PowerPC machine with a dead battery and while certainly disappointed, are addicted from that point on. :p

As for the older ones, a lot of it is probably a big, smelly, putrid snowball of greed compounded with ignorance. Guy A puts a machine up for an obviously exorbitant price, guy B sees guy A's ad and thinks "Wow, I can get THAT much!?" and then guy C, maybe with no harmful intention, goes on eBay to check prices... And the cycle repeats.

But yeah, you can find reasonably priced Macs, you just have to scour yard sales and pawn shops or be willing to pay shipping. It's kind of like this in game collecting too, all these "ULTRA R@RE!!1!" titles you see going for $200-$300 can be scored for a far more reasonable price with a little patience and a lot of travelling.

 

sadmanonatrain

Well-known member
I've always thought that there are two types of seller on eBay when it comes to finding one of their old computers:

The type who thinks his old *insert name here* is old and therefore useless who will price it low.

The type who thinks his old *insert name here* is old and therefore extremely rare who will price high- optimistically high!

I don't think the Macintoshes that priced highly sell anyway; the sellers still seem to list them!

 

uniserver

Well-known member
yeah plus its hard to inform people of what they should actually spend on a vintage mac.

you always have that guy that swoops up and some how and buys a SE/30 for 900.00 and nobody knows how or why.

I guess it was real CLEAN! :) or NIB :)

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
you always have that guy that swoops up and some how and buys a SE/30 for 900.00 and nobody knows how or why.
What do you mean? We all know that guy.

Anyway, this particular guy (like I said, I literally know him) bought it because he likes computers that are in new condition, new in box, had the money, and was willing to pay for it. He'll probably have it until he kicks the bucket.

I don't think it's worthwhile or civil to vilify him for it.

 
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