What happened to the supply of cheap used and surplus computers and electronics?
It used to be that you could find various bits of hardware going for reasonable prices on eBay, and second-hand computers at your typical shady market stall or cash stores red-top pawnbrokers at pretty low prices. 20 years ago, I picked up a PS2 that was clearly a surplus Xmas present, with almost all the bits and pieces still unopened in their plastic bags, for about half retail price. Around 4-5 years ago, I got a 38-inch TV for £100.
On a recent stroll through town, among other things, I found what appeared to be a 4-5 year old gaming PC on sale for about £1200, and laptops of a similar vintage for £500-600. You could surely buy new items with current-spec parts for around those prices. One had a couple of old corpo desktops for £200, of the sort that you used to be able to pick up for next to nothing if you arranged to collect. One particularly brazen shop had a large external disk, used, on sale for £140. For £20 more you could get a new one that presumably hasn't already racked up many thousands of hours of uptime being used for torrents, or whatever it is the cool kids are doing to pirate things these days.
Tech prices went mental during the pandemic, because all of the factories in China were shut and we were stuck at home with our furlough money burning a hole in our pocket. Prices started returning to normal, but then Mad Vlad invaded The Ukraine and did a cost of living crisis all over our face. A cost of living crisis is also a cost of doing business crisis - those pawnbrokers have got massive electric bills, those lads at the market need to give themselves a pay rise if their kids want to eat. They can mostly get away with putting up their prices, because a) everyone is used to high prices for tech and b) everyone expects the price of everything to go up anyway.
The situation is a bit better on eBay, because people have got lower overheads.
>They can mostly get away with putting up their prices, because a) everyone is used to high prices for tech and b) everyone expects the price of everything to go up anyway.
Greedflation. A lot of it is just greedflation.
In many other sectors as well.
But high prices eventually always attract more supply, and more supply means prices should come down again. Especially in a sector with such rapid product obsolescence* as computers and consumer electronics. Because there's no point adamantly keeping your high markup if there just isn't enough demand to sell all your stock.
* Everybody knows "planned obsolescence", but not many know that in product marketing, obsolescence as such is actually an inherent phenomenon that will eventually affect almost any product, planned or not. A product doesn't necessarily become obsolete just because a manufacturer consciously engineers it to fail or become unserviceable at a particular point. A product can become naturally obsolete because technology has moved on or competitors have come up with newer or better products, or regulations affecting the product's use may have changed, or simply because nobody wants it anymore and it has gone out of fashion.
This kind of natural obsolescence is usually beyond the manufacturer's control, as opposed to planned obsolescence, which manufacturers now utilise to actively arrange the point in time when your product becomes useless or breaks, and you have to buy a new one.
>>28476 I get that bills are going up, but who are they expecting to buy a shitty mass-market i5 laptop from years ago, paid in full, for the same or more than a brand new shitty mass-market i5 laptop with manufacturer's warranty and 3 years' credit?
Maybe it’s not just technology. I think second-hand selling might be worse all round. I say this because I have looked everywhere for second-hand classic novels (specifically, I wanted a copy of A Tale of Two Cities and I was unwilling to pay more than £2 for it), and you cannot buy out-of-copyright books from any charity shop any more. The Works doesn’t (don’t?) sell them now either. I forgot to check the plates and board games and novelty pint glasses in the charity shops because I thought it was just old books that had vanished, but I find it very odd that old computers have disappeared at the same time.
However, with the rise of cloud services, an old computer is much less rubbish than it used to be. You can use a decade-old computer to come here and browse YouTube; I have proof. And CEX want close to £150 for the same Mega Drives and Super Nintendos I paid £20 for in the 1990s, when they were more recent than my computer is now.
>>28475 I just grabbed a 3-4 year old thinkpad X1 on Ebay for a little over £100. Same type as my work laptop so I can use the existing dock. Not perfect condition as the internal speakers don't work, mind.
For light usage it works a lot better than a basic spec £250 new laptop.
I've got a feeling with tech in particular there's something a bit different to it- We're used to old tech going for next to nothing, because up until a few years ago, anything older than a couple of years was practically e-waste anyway. However, things have started to slow down- Not in terms of advancement, but certainly in terms of obsolescence. CPUs in particular reached a sort of apex in power a few years ago, where the average mid-range chip was already much more powerful than any ordinary consumer needs it to be for their word documents and facebook scrolling. Since then it's been possible to get away with an old computer for longer than it ever was before.
What has ended up going hand in hand with that is that people's perceived value stopped deteriorating as fast- And thus people are reluctant to just chuck out a perfectly good laptop, for example, like they used to. When it's still working just fine, only a bit on the old side, you're more likely to think "I can get a few quid for that, I'm not just letting it go". I've even ended up being that kind of person with computer upgrades, I never used to bother, I used to just chuck my old stuff in a big box of "spares" in case anything broke, and call it a day. But for the last few years I've been incrementally upgrading and selling my old parts at barely much more than about a 25% loss.
Combine all of that with constant pressure from companies like eBay and Vinted and so on, encouraging people to make a buck out of their old stuff instead of throwing it or donating it, and I think it's easy to imagine. People just have to be tight nowadays, because how else can we squeeze more blood from the stone of consumerism?
> Since then it's been possible to get away with an old computer for longer than it ever was before.
Except if you're trying to install Windows 11, which shuts out CPUs that are older than about 2017 (especially pre-Ryzen). There are ways of circumventing that restriction, but it can mean that you'll be excluded from Windows Update, which can somehow still check if you've got one of the permitted processors.
I agree with your general point, that people hold on to things for longer. There's a lot more eco consciousness now. Where you don't always have to keep getting the newest things. Wnich is of course nighthmare fuel for any manufacturer who desperately needs to keep selling you the newest model of something in order to keep up their inflated profits.
By voluntarily slowing down the rate at which you replace the consumer goods you own, it's a way of showing extreme consumerism the middle finger, without living poorly at all.
>>28482 A "desktop" needs many pieces. Screen, keyboard, mouse, all the cables that connect them. A tablet is all that in one, or so it promisses. You just get a thing that does it, you don't have to build it.
One reason is that hardware has gotten fast enough that most people aren't upgrading every 3 years like they were a decade ago, and a lot of the stuff being disposed of is being disposed of because it's basically unusable.
I used to work in IT for a fairly large organization and by 2018 the main reason for replacing computers was OS bloat. 5-10 year old machines being used for basic admin type work and web browsing without any performance complaints would become unusable once they were upgraded to Windows 10.
No one wants to buy used machines which can't run an in-support version of windows without spending the cost of a new machine to upgrade to a usable spec, and if you want a cheap linux box to use as a home server or whatever there are far better options than a used desktop these days.
Also stricter WEEE and data protection regs mean everything tends to get disposed of via IT recycling companies now, which means any usable stuff gets refurbished and sold on for what it's actually worth instead of "get rid of it ASAP" prices.
>>28481 is right about gaming PCs. Since crypto mining and the GPU shortage prices for used hardware have gone up enough that it's often worth selling old processors and GPUs on ebay.
