Ask HN: What's your process for reselling your used hardware? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your process for reselling your used hardware?

36 pointskaptain35 comments

I figure that the HN crowd has a large amount of hardware that it cycles through. How/where do you sell it? I'm looking for something painless where I don't have to spend a lot of time vetting the buyer or convincing the buyer that I am a legitimate seller.

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Few years back, I thought about this and came up with some sort of an interesting idea. Make a museum of sort for future generations (for our family) and hopefully for the small community I came from (I'm from a small town in India).

Inspired by a friend of mine who digs up and collects World War items, including buried soldiers, shells, guns, etc. He is funded by the Japanese, British, and a tad from the Indian government and have proudly donated the museum to the public.

I'm not very nostalgic, and so prior to this, I either gave it to someone or sell them off for cheap - stay minimal, and simpler.

Now, I collect/archive interesting items which our family have used. I still sell and/or give off many working devices. I'm preserving the iPhone 3G (first iPhone released in India), iPhone 4, iPhone 6 (but not the 7, 8 which are same as 6). I've analog wired phones, the white MacBook, first MacBook Air, the old 16-inch MacBook Pro (I think, from around 2006) Megabyte capacity HDD, Floppy Disk, etc.

This also extends to some toys, apparels for the kids but they are more of personal interest.

I'm not expecting too much out of this, and will start small but I'm hoping that I should be able to kickstart something in the next few years.

My father worked in telecom for 30 years, doing network validation engineering. We recently put together a curio with all the phones he’s tested over the years. All the IPhones, countless androids. Old Nokia / bell phones. Just be sure to remove the batteries!

Ah! Thanks. I really need to remove the battery from the 2016 MacBook Air.

No problem, I spent this past Christmas break shucking old Iphones for his display case. Do it sooner rather than later!

I don’t really. Hardware generally doesn’t get less useful with age, just less efficient than new/current hardware. Handing that inefficiency off to someone else doesn’t do well for our overall carbon footprint.

Instead, buy things that last, use them until you can’t, then recycle them: https://www.techdump.org/

Sent from my 2016 iPhone SE.

> Handing that inefficiency off to someone else doesn’t do well for our overall carbon footprint.

Instead, they will go ahead and buy a new item for themselves. Its increased efficiency is unlikely to make up for the cost of manufacturing an entire new item from scratch, carbon-wise.

Not if I continue to use the old hardware until it is unusable.

Even for motor vehicles?

Consider that while a ML engineer is running the GPU all day, every day, a weekend gamer will run a game on it only every weekend.

Anyone have a recommendation for a similar organisation in the UK?

Your local tip. (Deal with disks according to your paranoia level first of course.)

I generally don't tend to amass hardware that I will have to sell off later. If I buy something, it's because I expect to use it for as long as possible, basically until it is so far behind the curve that it is effectively useless. At that point I either give it away for someone to tinker with, or hand it off for recycling.

Both my desktop and my laptop are from ~2011, with a few token upgrades here and there. My last smartphone was from 2014, I replaced it last year because it bricked itself.

However I am actually in the process of having to sell some hardware. Some it I have gotten for free (refurb Thinkcentre M72e Tiny PC, old single disk Zyxel NAS), most of it stuff my dad left behind when he passed away earlier this year. Old PCs, various electronics and so on.

Generally if it contains any data, I will either securely wipe the drives or destroy them and sell without storage.

For my particular situation, I already knew his band mates and some of his old colleagues, so they got first dibs on the band gear (amps, speakers, mixers, HDD recorder) and electronics tools. Some stuff was donated after that.

Then I set up basically an open rummage sale, advertised it locally and let people have a look around and make bids (I did look up the general price ranges for most of the interesting stuff). I'm on the third weekend of doing that, once enough stuff is gone, all the rest will go to recycling.

Honestly the most painless way to sell stuff for me has been the local Craigslist-alike, I put a decent description and don't try to get the absolute highest price. That usually makes sure my stuff sells quickly.

I sell cheaper things (<£200) on eBay for whatever I get in the auction, even if I only make enough to cover the postage.

More expensive things I try to find friends and family willing to give me something for them. eBay scammers for macs and iPads are a nightmare as it’s easy for them to win an auction and then disappear when they see you’re not gonna get screwed over. Then you have to start all over again.

I see it more as reuse than selling. The money I make from selling covers the effort of selling it and is a reward for keeping the junk from piling up.

Actually I never do. Once a piece of hardware is no longer useful to me, I usually give it away to someone who might have use for it. Often that ends up being my parents which is arguably pointless, given how little they look after hardware in general but... Oh well...

Sadly Facebook Marketplace seems to be the most active.

I say sadly because the overall level of intelligence, diligence and responsibility is much lower than Craigslist, eBay or forums. This of course is my anecdotal opinion.

eBay has a bias towards the buyer during disputes and many people are taking advantage of that.

Craigslist was basically sidelined here in Canada due to eBay's heavy advertising of their competitor called Kijiji.ca

A further problem here in Canada is that shipping is pretty expensive so local pickup works best.

The last thing I sold on ebay was a 11 year old netbook - the asus eee pc 1000he. I had replaced it's hdd with an SSD 9 years back and when I booted it after a EIGHT year hiatus it booted just fine, running xp and chrome and for the most part working okay. I listed it on ebay and sold it for 55 bucks. I'm definitely hoping that it found someone who actually uses it for something.

In general, if it's still working and I believe it has use left, I find ebay to be an amazing place to sell it. Some times, it sells for far greater value than it should, but from the names it apppears as if it's bought by people who can't otherwise afford any gadget. Definitely feels better than tossing it.

If it doesn't work, or is fully broken, I just toss it in the best buy recycle bin most of the times. Still have my broken Vaio Z (the original RAID0 beauty), if there's any takers I'll ship it for free!

My last sale of ebay didn't end well so I gave up. They quibbled over the year of manufacture V year of release for a seven year old computer. Get a life. I negotiated a 20% refund to get the case closed.

Not aware of any "easy" sale places. Best be is just take a huge hit on the price & it'll move fast. That also assumes it's relatively modern gear.

Personally I go through a lot of gaming hardware. Which means GPU gets outdated but CPU/RAM is still solid. So that makes for a good home server. Or I pass it on to family - a old gaming rig makes for a superb facebook machine.

I've sold old computer hardware on both eBay and hardforum [1]. The nice thing about hardforum is a lot of buyers have heatware [2] which makes it easy to judge their legitimacy. I'm sure there's other forums out there that have similar buy/sell sections you can use. To increase your legitimacy it's best to maybe explain a bit about the hardware (e.g. how hard was it run) and have a picture with something showing ownership (e.g. the hardware with a piece of paper where your username is written).

[1] https://hardforum.com/

[2] https://www.heatware.com/

Eh hardforum has a good FS/FT community but the rest of the place is becoming a cesspool of trumpists

I generally keep all of my computers. I have an extensive computing collection going back to the mid 90s; 1ghz slot cpus, super socket 7 boards, 3dfx cards, a handful of ISA soundblasters, etc.

When I buy a piece of computer hardware I try to think of how it will be perceived in the future for someone whose loves these devices. For example I just retired my main desktop with a 2600k with the original GTX Titan. It’s packed away and I may bring it out someday to make a powerful windows XP rig.

I find ebay works great, though they do take a reasonable chunk of the money. The reputation aspect is handled for you. Auctions for most things seem to sell for reasonable prices, so it removes the effort of working out a good price. At least in the UK, a few clicks after your item sells on the website and a courier will pick it up the next day from your home. Before this was a thing, working out how to ship large items was more hassle and quite expensive.

I generally give away pcs to friends and family and resell Macs as the value tends to hold and be easier to eBay off. My friends swap pc parts based on what each person does (i had a pc box with a good Video card for gaming and i don’t game so a friend took it out and replaced it with something less suited for that and installed more memory for me to code).

But Macs always sell easily on basically any platform

If it's a phone and it's not broken, sell it on Swappa. By far the best marketplace for phones.

I use eBay for most other electronics. The fees are killer but whatever I'm happy to get a few bucks and get these things out of my drawer.

If you want to sell something fast use FB Marketplace. I sold household items on there in under 3hours from listing to pickup.

Tablets, laptops, and watches, too.

One of my projects over the years has been a hardware exchange that would run a program that would get all installed parts in a computer, possibly stress test. Find a buyer and optionally sell you an upgrade for the diferencie in price.

It’s called jtronics.exchange, but currently rewriting most of it. If any one would like to help it would be super cool.

Try reddit.com/r/hardwareswap, they have buyers and sellers who must verify their goods and also lists if they've committed fraud before, and how many successful sales before that.

> also lists if they've committed fraud on that account before

ebay is the easiest but if the item is going for less than £10 don’t bother.

Freecycle is also good as are forums like: https://forums.servethehome.com/

If you have a LOT of gear - ie. rooms full of the stuff as I found in a hoarder family home I had to clear recently you can pay £200 to have a professional IT recycling company to take it all and wipe all the disks on your behalf. They provided certificates for all wiped hard drives and recycled items.

Speaking of which, I'm currently trolling classifieds and Facebook marketplace trying to find a first generation threadripper box on the cheap. I'm in Denmark

I sold my 2015 13" macbook pro for 900$, just remarkable if you can get almost half the price back after 5 years.

Hardware forums like forums.serverhrhome.com Anandtech arstechnica etc

I never resell stuff, I upgrade my phone, pc and laptop once every 6 years and keep the previous as a backup. And the one before that i disassemble to parts and only keep those if they're still useable (and useful e.g. if i repair a family members pc) or throw them away.

With 8 kids, there’s always someone who’ll take laptops, etc. ;-)

Hardware deserves your care. If you're gonna put it down, the least you can do is feel the pain, whatever means to you.

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