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Apple offers $970 in trade-in value for $52,199 Mac Pro
- BugsJustFindMe 4y ago> What else has dropped 50x in value in 3 years All tech ever made in the entire history of tech, as far as I can tell. It kinda doesn't matter if you can get more for it in a secondary marketplace. Manufacturers don't really want to be in the business of buying things back from you if it will cost them less to make a new one.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI think it’s also absurd to say it’s dropped in value just on a single bid that’s likely far out of market. Apple doesn’t set the price in the secondary market, just the primary market. To know the price you need to get bids from who ever is in the market for your stuff.
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- tshaddox 4y ago> All tech ever made in the entire history of tech, as far as I can tell. I suspect 50x in 3 years would be exceedingly rare to see outside of products that literally expire or break in 3 years or are part of some ecosystem that has essentially died. Apple's trade-ins for iPhones, for instance, are much more generous than that. I suspect the issue here is simply that Apple doesn't want to be in the business of selling used desktop computers, but they do want to be in the business of selling used smartphones.
- quartz 4y agoI'm trying to figure out what "dropped 50x" even means... wouldn't that be like -$2.5 million?
- 988747 4y agoFollowed the comments thread and I wonder: can this https://twitter.com/DurvidImel/status/1615374036820697089?s=20 https://twitter.com/DurvidImel/status/1615374036820697089?s=... be considered a legally binding contract? Because if so, then someone named Alec Ploof just made a lot of money :)
- elil17 4y agoIt is absolutely a valid contract - if both parties are in the US it shouldn't be too hard to enforce.
- yakkityyak 4y agolol, no.
- elil17 4y agoAssent, offer/acceptance, consideration, and capacity - looks like a contract to me. I don't see the argument against it.
- deltree7 4y agoIt is indeed legally bound https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/contracts-101-make-legally-valid-30247.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/contracts-101-make-l...
- BirAdam 4y agoSell it on an auction site with a base price with which you’re comfortable.
- brundolf 4y agoApple's trade-in prices have always been lowballed, but they aren't normally this extreme. Usually you get just enough that you might choose to take the loss instead of dealing with Ebay or something But I wouldn't be surprised if this one is just a weird edge-case in their formula with no eyes on it (and one that probably serves a vanishingly small number of customers, who would want to casually trade-in their $50k machine instead of finding the best price they can get on the open market) For reference: The OP is looking at a 1.8% trade-in value on a 3 year old machine Whereas I can currently get 16% trade-in value on my 4.5-year-old iPhone XS
- pdpi 4y agoThe trade-in values tend to be reasonable for off-the-shelf configurations (and especially base configurations). Not great, but reasonable. It’s when you start stacking build-to-order options that the price grows much faster than the trade-in value.
- brundolf 4y agoYeah that makes sense too
- matwood 4y agoExactly. The BTO options are basically zeroed out for the trade in. If you're someone who plans to upgrade their machine frequently using the trade-in, go with one of the primary configurations.
- carlmr 4y agoOne of the issues is also that there's usually no good way to search for exact configurations when looking for traded in machines. Meaning that it's harder to convey the value to the end customer.
- harvey9 4y agoThe search seems like an easy problem to solve. A set of options to select when you offer up a machine for trade is viable for any self built system. For Apple, they could just link your original purchase data so could be even easier.
- jiggawatts 4y agoReminds me of customers these would “invest” huge amounts of capex into servers in the early 2000s when processor speed was going up exponentially. One guy was complaining that their mail server — the size of half a rack — was slow. I pointed out that the Blackberry phone he was syncing to it was faster. “But the server cost over a hundred thousand dollars!” Yes… and now it’s worthless.
- matwood 4y agoHaving looked at and bought racks of used servers before, this pricing 'oddity' isn't that surprising to me. Apple is thought of as a consumer company, but 50k for a machine is strictly enterprise with the appropriate markup. In this case it got double whammied because of the switch over to Apple Silicon.
- jiggawatts 4y agoIt was massively overpriced to begin with. At the time it was first released you could already buy a Threadripper workstation with an NVIDIA GPU that would run circles around it for a fraction of the price.
- pavlov 4y agoIf you bought a $50k Silicon Graphics O2 workstation in 1997, it probably was worth that much in 2000.
- lallysingh 4y agoNo, I was watching at the time... Too many shops needed spares
- falcolas 4y agoI wonder how much the metals in it are worth nowadays...
- dmix 4y agoThis isn't really about the market value of this machine, it's a very specific trade-in value.
- Keyframe 4y agoI worked on SGI machines back then. They were daylight robbery, but having them (with appropriate software) in your arsenal was a major and key advantage. Not speed only but things you just couldn't do with other systems. This apple machine and video claim? Not so very much.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoWho actually pays well for good-condition used computers these days? I have a 2019 MacBook Pro that could serve somebody well in a second life. I mean like companies, not some sketchy craigslist trade where somebody just tries to rob me of it. Last time I sold a laptop on Ebay, it ended up at some freight forwarders address with the recipient claiming they didn't get it. Thankfully Ebay sided with me then, but still, no telling if they will in the future. I don't want to give it up for $200 or whatever Apple is offering, for that lowball offer, I'll just keep the laptop to travel with.
- yieldcrv 4y agoI paid for an M1 when it came out because I wanted that specific technology combination.
- cwhatididtheir 4y agoFacebook marketplace is great for selling used Apple products. The social identity aspect makes identifying potential scammers easy. You’ll still get blasted by a dozen or so of these, but they’re really obvious… New accounts with no friends for example. I’ve been surprised what people will pay for used laptops and other apple tech.
- kelchm 4y agoI guess the risk involved isn't substantially different from eBay, but I've had pretty good luck selling Apple hardware and phones via Swappa: https://swappa.com https://swappa.com
- mixmastamyk 4y agoNot sure. Tried to sell a several-year-old $5k pro laptop and thunderbolt dock a month or two ago at $400. No takers, which was surprising to me as it is a great one. But thanks for the travel laptop idea.
- grecy 4y agoI always buy used Mac laptops. I'm typing this on a 2014 MBP I bought used in 2019, and is still going strong. I want to edit 4k video, so in the next 12 months I'll most likely upgrade to a used M1 or M2 MBP or air.
- jeffbee 4y agoI wonder what the config is. Apple will sell you presently a 28-core, 1.5TiB, 8TiB SSD + 2 64GB GPUs for that price. Which seems a bit extreme. If they needed that type of rig it's hard to imagine what other kind of thing they want to trade it for, since Apple no longer offers anything remotely comparable. The only thing even resembling it is the top-spec mac Studio with a tiny fraction of the memory.
- crazygringo 4y agoThat's amusing... but I assume it's because trade-in values are based on non-upgraded or non-custom configurations. I know that even on eBay, the storage size on iPhones is basically irrelevant to resale price, for example. Your $$ storage upgrade doesn't matter. [EDIT: per comments, I might be wrong on that one in the general case, so never mind.] So I have to assume that where Apple is putting trade-in devices into a standardized resale pipeline, the only part that matters is what can be standardized. That they're not going to create a one-off listing in the Apple store for a single particular refurb configuration. So sell it on eBay.
- jeffbee 4y ago> on eBay, the storage size on iPhones is basically irrelevant to resale price This claim seems quite unlikely. I just checked iPhone 13 128GB within 100 miles of the Bay Area and the median selling price for sold items was $549 but for 256GB it was $630 and for 512GB it was $735.
- hansvm 4y ago> the storage size on iPhones is basically irrelevant to resale price That never used to be the case back in the 3/4/5 era when I sold them for a living. Any hunch as to why that would change?
- poorbutdebtfree 4y agoI'll give you $980.
- dilippkumar 4y agoAre we bidding? I bid $990
- japanman425 4y agoThe real L here is spending 50k on a Mac Pro. (Not because it’s a mac, just unnecessary)
- burkaman 4y agoI genuinely didn't know you could pay that much for a computer. Looking at the max specs of the Mac Pro (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower), it looks like everything is marked up 2-20x the price of the individual components. $7000 for a ~$3000 processor, $25000 for ~$1500 of RAM, etc. Edit: I misread Newegg, the RAM would be more like $10500
- cm2187 4y agoThat's why all the components are soldered on those days.
- kube-system 4y agoApple does have a significant mark up, yes, but, the costs of bringing a product like that to market is not a matter of adding up the price of the components.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoThe price Apple sells these configurations is entirely unrelated to any sort of costs. They just do it because they can as they are the sole provider of high end machines running macOS.
- kube-system 4y agoYou are right. I did not intend to imply that they were related to costs. I was simply stating that those proposed costs weren't accurate anyway.
- thereddaikon 4y agoThere was a brief moment in the 90's before Jobs returned when Apple allowed MacOS to be licensed to third party system integrators. Naturally, the companies that popped up to sell generic Macs were massively under cutting Apple. Their prices have never been something that could stand up to direct competition.
- sithadmin 4y agoI don't understand what one would do with a $52,199 Mac Pro. If you're blowing that kind of money on a Mac, you probably need to seriously rethink how you're approaching your technical and business processes.
- dmix 4y agoFor some companies investing in the know-how to build and maintain custom workstations for a couple high-end employees isn't worth the effort or cost saving. That's the only excuse I could come up with.
- sithadmin 4y agoYou don't even need to invest in the 'build and maintain' aspect of things for use cases like the Twitter poster's (YouTube content). Just the backend network and storage services.
- browningstreet 4y agoHe works for MKBHD, they shoot and post 8K videos to Youtube.
- sithadmin 4y agoI know. I looked into it. That still doesn't justify a $52.Xk Mac. Sure, other shops in that field are going to be spending the same kind of money, but less of it on the Mac, more of it on networking and storage. Then again, when you're MKBHD, one big hit video in a given month probably covers a decent portion of the cost of that insanely spec'd out Mac.
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- matwood 4y ago
- hbn 4y agoI don't think it's particularly surprising Apple doesn't want to pay you tens of thousands of dollars for you to return an old machine that has almost zero market for buyers. What are they gonna do, take the time to sell it for parts? Anyone in the market to spend that much is probably a business that would rather just buy a new machine. They'll give a better percentage on your used iPhone 12 Pro because they can easily find someone to buy a refurbished iPhone. Not so with a $52,199 Mac pro.
- jeffbee 4y agoIf they're worthless to Apple why is Apple marketing refurb Mac Pro starting at $5k on their website right now?
- bandyaboot 4y agoIt’s not that they’re worthless. It’s that to be able to offer anything approaching what most would consider a reasonable trade in value for this kind of machine, they would have to be selling it themselves for what, like $20k? I think they would have a very difficult time moving those.
- jeffbee 4y agoThey are though. A refurb with half the memory of the $52k machine is priced at $28k.
- daniel_iversen 4y agoRemember if you are a business you’d have written off the machine in tax already, so the $1K is really just a bonus
- coryrc 4y agoJerry : You don’t even know what a write off is. Kramer : Do you? Jerry : No. I don’t. Kramer : But they do, and they are the ones writing it off. aka that's not how write-offs work
- TAForObvReasons 4y agoNot an accountant. 3 years is shorter than the expected 5-year depreciation [1], so if you took a section 179 deduction you may have to pay some of it back. It may actually be worse to trade in than to let the machine sit for a few years. [1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946#en_US_2020_publink1000107533 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946#en_US_2020_publink1000...
- euph0ria 4y agoSomething that surprised me was that my MacBook that is pristine but 5 years old do not get any more OS updates.. and therefore no latest Xcode.. and therefore worthless to me. Are all iOS/Mac devs buying new machines every five years?
- fay59 4y ago5 years seems like a low for Apple device longevity. I think that there’s an enormous difference between today’s Macs and Macs from 5 years ago and maybe the leap is accelerate deprecation, but there was a long period of stagnating macOS requirements. Hope we return to that for Apple Silicon Macs.
- roflyear 4y agoI've had really bad personal luck with apple devices over the last 5+ years.
- goosedragons 4y agoIt depends when you buy vs. when it was first released. The 2014 Mac Mini for example was sold until late 2018 so it's perfectly possible for someone to have bought it Sept. 2018 which means only 3 years of new macOS versions as it didn't get Ventura. I think the model with the best supported OS track record from Apple is still the Mac Plus from 1986 which was supported all the way through 7.5.5 in 1996.
- Gigachad 4y agoThis has been really disappointing imo. I’m donating to the Asahi Linux project now so when my 2021 MacBook stops getting updates I’ll be able to run Linux on it. https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
- yamtaddle 4y agoOne strategy is to check product lifespans before buying—you can usually get at least 7ish years of updates for a Mac if you don't accidentally buy a product that's just about to receive an update. I think macrumors has a chart for this with simple "buy / caution / do not buy" indicators and history of time between updates for various kinds of products. Buying early in a model's lifecycle can make a big difference. Another is to just buy used every couple years. Buy a 1- or 2-year-old Macbook or iPad or whatever, sell a couple years later, repeat. Average annual spending can be surprisingly low this way, after an initial higher expenditure to buy your "ticket" to this train, of course, while still keeping you on recent devices just about all the time. Some businesses simply lease their Macs, so don't really have that problem. They'll lease a new set of devices long before any go out of support. Overall, any budget-conscious Apple strategy has to factor in the used market. Even if you're always buying new, if you time sales right you can recover a lot of your purchase price by selling your old devices. This can seem a little weird if you're used to the used market for consumer PCs—in that world, holding on to every device until it is totally worthless makes a lot more sense, because they lose used-market value much faster than Macs.
- commandlinefan 4y ago> What else has dropped 50x in value in 3 years I mean, it's not quite as extreme, but we all sort of expect cars to drop ~30x in value in about the same time period.
- crindy 4y agoA car might drop in value by 30% in 3 years, not 30x.
- mattigames 4y agoMechanical parts subject to outdoor conditions/wear are nowhere in the same real as tech hardware.
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- dkobia 4y agoThere are easier ways to say they don't want it, which is what this says.
- gigatexal 4y agoSomeone text John Siracusa with a crying laughing emoji.
- racl101 4y agoElectronics depreciate fast. That's just that. Not even exclusively Apple thing. You want something that appreciates? Buy a Rolex.
- w4rh4wk5 4y agoLoaded question, but as a Windows user I'd really like to know. Given that you can buy an acceptable Mac for, say, $5000, does that $52,000 Mac Pro give you any real advantage in terms of productivity. Are you even twice as productive? As a reference, I recently upgraded my rig with an AMD 7950X and an RTX 4080 (+ other components) for around $3500. At this point there isn't really any other hardware available, that'd give me a justifiable boost in productivity.
- matwood 4y agoIt was my understanding that it was basically built for people who work with 8k video. That's way outside my realm, so maybe someone else will add some details.
- wheats 4y agoWell, it would be application dependent of course. For instance at that price we are talking about a machine that was purchased because it needed to have 1.5TB of RAM and channels able to take advantage of it. I would imagine it indeed could be more than twice as fast if everything being done is cached in RAM instead of having to reference a disk. We are talking about having 4 monitors simultaneously display 8K video editing, or heavy database workloads you usually wouldn't see on consumer PCs for machines like this.
- grecy 4y agoI remember last time a machine like this popped up on HN a commenter said machines like this are purpose built one-off to color grade[1] Hollywood blockbusters that have budgets well north of $100M. Apparently, the answer is yes. When you have a hyper-hyper specific need, a machine like this really is worth it. [1] I'm no expert in video, and color grading is the only step I remember, but I'm sure there were other steps that it's used for too.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI've also read that you'd never color-grade a Hollywood blockbuster on their monitor.
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- colonwqbang 4y agoI love that they charge $400 for the wheels under the case. Apple iWheels Pro
- booleandilemma 4y agoOnly compatible with the associated iFloor.
- ggm 4y agoHow many motherboards of the time had lanes to handle 1.5Tb of memory, and maintain bandwidth to multiple (4) high refresh-rate hi-res monitors? I do really think its overpriced, but I also wonder if the "I can do better" people have configured a system in ALL its glory: not just "lots of RAM" but "lots of RAM with ECC, and with good fast bandwidth, and with sensible independent paths to video/GPU and oneward to displays doing 8K, running a single composite desktop (when required) on all of them, with no tearing" If in fact, this is just routine, sure: there's an APPLE tax. If this is a modern-day equivalent of a 4-plate steenbeck edit suite, it's priced for its market: the people who by "Red" lenses. You can do the same job on a simpler device, sure. Also: it grates cheese.
- helf 4y agoHow in the hell can a Mac Pro cost that much? goes to Apple’s online store
- throwawayapples 4y agoSorting high to low indicates that Apple does charge quite a bit for these (currently $39,239.00 is the most expensive) https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/mac-pro-macbook-pro https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/mac-pro-macbook-p...
- WheelsAtLarge 4y agoTech has always been a losing preposition. I paid 1000's of dollars for tech products I have in my house that have lost ALL their value. Chances are I'll have to pay to get rid of them. So don't expect for your tech stuff to have value after you're done with it. Also, Apple is in the business of selling not buying so that's the last place you go to sell your tech gear and hope to get some money back. Now that I think about it, I wonder what DELL would pay for your $52,199 Mac Pro? Do I hear $0?
- sidcool 4y agoApple is overpriced because it has the halo effect on its customers. Their products are great, no doubt, and PCs don't come close. But they are not good to be priced at that level. This includes Macs and iPhones. I feel iPads are still priced fair.