[rescue] G4 pricing

[velociraptor]

On 8/14/06, Jonathan C. Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>
> > Is $350 a good price for a G4/400 Power Mac, 640MB RAM, two disks (75GB
> > and 128GB)?
>
> If it doesn't have an AGP slot, no.  If it has an AGP slot, it's still
> not excellent.  A little less than twice that price got me a dual-1GHz
> G4 w/ crap video, 1GB memory, and no disk around Christmas time.  Disks
> are cheap.  Video cards aren't -that- horribly expensive, but upgrading
> the rest of the box isn't really an option.
>
> I've found that Macs with easily-fixed things wrong with them (dead
> disks, bad RAM, etc.) tend to go for very cheap, even if the rest of the
> specs are decent.

I agree with both points Jonathan's made.  You might want to toss out
the "prices will be tanking soon" card with the seller as well, since
the MacPro prices are very competitive in the build-to-order arena,
and that will be driving low-end PPC prices down.

Particularly on the second point, yes, people who buy Macs seem to
think hardware is voodoo.  I think it has to do with the fact that
many of the folks who buy Macs really never got into computers, so
they never got to the "I can upgrade/build it myself for cheaper"
point that the majority of PC users get to.  For a lot of PC folks,
the "do it yourself" impulse becomes a self-defense mechanism -- they
don't really like it but they do it anyway -- since so many
"commodity" PC boxes are, well, crap, with marginal PSUs, etc.

=Nadine=