Mac switcharoo
rzwitserloot posted in apple on May 23rd, 2006

I sold the iBook and bought the MacBook. Fortunately, I managed to sell the iBook for almost the same price I paid for it 7 months ago.

I’ll admit that such an unprecedented resale value for computer hardware is made possible partly by some really decent student discounts, but still:

Resell a computer for the same price you bought it for even after the model has been made obsolete?
Used to be that notion would generate laughs.

I’m strongly considering ‘riding the wave’ for macs from here on out: Everytime a new model is released, sell the old one, buy the new one. While a bit of a hassle, it doesn’t cost anymore than completely replacing it every 3 years, and you get the considerable advantage of getting a shiny new toy every year. For this new MacBook I’m also going to take extra care with keeping it scratch-free, and, needless to say, I’ll keep the box again, because that improves resale value.

The notion that you can resell a mac for almost buying price means its effectively really cheap to testdrive one: Just order a new one, and, if you don’t like it, you get your money back, ‘guaranteed’. You can take as long as you want to test it as long as you don’t break it.
I know Alper struck out trying to convince a developer at his employer to buy a mac portable instead of a PC notebook. Perhaps the resale argument might help?

NB: There is some devaluation when your model becomes ‘deprecated’. However, you can work around it by buying new macs every 6 months, bouncing between ie a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, which so far have different model upgrade cycles. Then you’ll always be selling a macbook with the exact same specs as a model still being sold by Apple, and provided you keep it good looking, you should be able to fetch 90%+ of full price.