Apple offers $970 in trade-in value for $52,199 Mac Pro | Hacker News Reader

Apple offers $970 in trade-in value for $52,199 Mac Pro

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167 pointsfrankjr135 comments

Apple'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

The 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.

Yeah that makes sense too

Exactly. 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.

One 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.

The 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.

I'd recommend trying to sell anywhere but Ebay. FB Marketplace, Swappa, even Craigslist.

I recently sold on Ebay after a few year hiatus. I cannot believe the haircut you take these days. I sold an item for $360.00 flat. Ebay gave me $308.00. Since when have they charged 15%?

1. In the UK at least they have an 80% off sellers fees roughly every fortnight.

2. All the rest you end up dealing with people asking if it's available only to then disappear (why they ask in the first place I don't know), or you wait around for the one who's supposed to be coming, but then doesn't. eBay is a much better experience.

For FB and Craigslist, granted.

Swappa at least has been great to me. And the selling fees are substantially lower.

Swappa fees are low, but you have to pay sales tax. I prefer Craigslist or Facebook.

Can't comment on swappa because it isn't in the UK. Everything I've tried except eBay is full of time wasters though.

Between eBay and PayPal fees, I believe it's been at least 13% for decades.

That may be where it diverged. In my case at least, ebay paid me directly. Perhaps they just moved finance in house and tacked on previous paypal fees onto selling fees.

In the past, you had to pay Ebay fees and Paypal fees, and shipping. Did that 15% include the payment processing? I do think their fess are too high, but they are well within the normal range for marketplaces.

Just wait until the buyer falsely claims they didn’t receive the item. Or that it’s broken. Or that it’s not as described. I rarely sell there any more because it’s just not worth the hassle.

Recently sold an item on ebay. Buyer opened up a dispute with ebay saying the item didnt work. I provided a return label. Buyer then claimed the post office couldnt return it because the item had over 100 mg of mercury in it (a new one to me...). Photos he provided were of the item unpowered & in perfect condition. Ebay ruled in my favor!

Then the buyer then just went through his bank and refunded that way. In the end I am out $240 + $20 for a "payments dispute fee".

I thought the trade in on the iPhone 10 was pretty good when I took advantage of it last year. But that was via T-mobile and came with a 2 year contract. I also traded in my apple watch for a new one, and though the $100 was pretty decent compared to the $250 I paid for it.

But for my second-gen iPad Pro, it is basically considered scrap. So not very consistent at all.

They don’t want it back! Like luxury cars, the market for $50k computers is shallow. No company is buying it.

So you need to find someone with a credit card willing to drop $10k on an old computer. Why would someone do that?

Hell, in my professional life I’ve purged devices with $5m of depreciated value because the replacement cost of a new thing was less than the operational cost of keeping the old thing running.

Apple may not want it back because they don't want to deal with refurbing and reselling a niche product, but somebody out there would certainly want it for a decent fraction of the original price. Hardware doesn't get obsoleted as fast as it did 20 years ago

That’s why eBay exists.

If you trade in your old BMW, you’ll get less $ than if you sold privately, but you’d also have less hassle.

It's only two datapoints, so perhaps not interesting. I've noticed the Google Store is now doing this as well - almost overnight trade-in values have tanked.

I traded in my son's cracked screen Pixel 3 XL 64GB in December for a new Pixel 7. I received a $271 refund, which was $6 higher than their on-line estimate. I was puzzled then.

I was even more puzzled now when I needed a new phone and had a perfectly good condition Pixel 6 Pro that I was offered $122 on a few days ago. I opted to sell it instead.

Either manufacturers/carriers were juicing trade-in offers for sales, or some bottom has dropped out of some market. I've always assumed some third party like Assurant or whomever are the ones actually purchasing these phones to refurbish and sell onward.

I worked for a university here in So Cal. Our lab fell on hard times and we were scrapping equipment. We had a Crimson series (if memory serves) server that had originally cost like 40k. My boss was screaming at me to sell it for something (think early 2000s).

I had to explain to him that we could pay to have it recycled for $85.

I 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), 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

That's why all the components are soldered on those days.

Apple 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.

The 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.

You 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.

There 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.

Had they continued down that road, Apple would probably be as successful today as IBM's PC division.

Sure but part of their success is being a lifestyle brand. A lot of people buy Apple for that. The interesting question here is around the productivity value of a 52k computer versus something at 5k or less, since almost nobody is dropping 52k on a computer just to fit in with the cool kids.

For a video editor in an Apple shop who makes hundreds of thousands more by getting a video out a few hours faster, spending 50k do to do that makes sense. Nobody buys a fully loaded Mac Pro to fit in at the lunch table.

Lenovo seems to be doing alright. But Apple has one big difference from IBM, they control the software side. So allowing generic Macs wouldn't turn them in to IBM. It would turn them in to Microsoft.

Lenovo would have been successful with or without.

They were both massively undercutting and outperforming Apple, which Apple hadn't anticipated. They were expecting the clones to compete just for the low end.

I buy Apple because of the vertical integration. They make the software and the hardware, both work perfectly together.

Just look at Microsoft and the Windows Modern Standby debacle how not to do it.

That's true but I guess the poster was already refering to retail prices of those components which is more than what apple pays for them. And looking at the prices of other manufacturers at different scales that can offer those components integrated in products I would argue that "significant" mark up in this case is bordering profiteering.

I understand but come on, look at that RAM price. If I can find a 20x better deal with 10 seconds on Newegg, presumably Apple can get those components for like 100x less than they're selling them for.

Also $400 for some nice rolly wheels, or $700 if you decide to buy them separately: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

I don't even see any 1.5TB 12x128gb DDR4 ECC kits on Newegg.

The biggest one I see is this, which is only 50% cheaper than Apple's price per stick. Not 20x. Not even 2x.

https://www.newegg.com/nemix-ram-512gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/...

And if you go with a brand name kit, Apple's price is pretty close to Newegg.

That's not to say any of this matters. Apple sells a completed product, not a box of parts. If you want a box of parts, you're in the wrong place.

You're right I got confused, it looks like closer to a 2x markup. You don't have to buy it all as one kit though, right? Just get 6 of these for $10,500: https://www.newegg.com/nemix-ram-256gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/...

Of course, Apple doesn't use Nemix sticks either. Does Nemix get the same binned chips that SK Hynix uses in their namesake brand?

The cheapest name brand is this, $19,000+ for 1.5TB:

https://www.newegg.com/hynix-256gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/1X5-...

Huh?

Apple has a net income of 100B/year. I'm sure that has to do with big markups on their hardware.

Our statements are not mutually exclusive

Indeed.

Intel‘s recommended customer price is $8200 [1], and each of the 12 DDR4 sticks is probably north of $1k [2].

Are Xeons and dense ECC ram worth what they cost even at the part level? Not really, but servers have different economics than personal machines.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/193754/...

[2] https://www.newegg.com/arch-memory-128gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/...

I 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.

If they're worthless to Apple why is Apple marketing refurb Mac Pro starting at $5k on their website right now?

It’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.

They are though. A refurb with half the memory of the $52k machine is priced at $28k.

Something 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?

5 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.

I've had really bad personal luck with apple devices over the last 5+ years.

It 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.

This 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

One 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.

Good idea, thanks. Next purchase will be a Mac Mini for daily workstation and I'll keep my worthless MacBook and remote desktop whenever I need to be mobile.

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com

Always check that when buying any Apple products.

In general if you’re a professional software engineer, the productivity upgrade of upgrading your tools at least every 5-6 years is worth the money.

If you bought high-end-ish laptops in 2021, 2016, 2011, 2006, you’d have gone through 3 different microarchitectures, and had a transformative experience change on each upgrade. If you upgrade every year, not so much.

I don’t like the XCode MacOS version requirements - I couldnt build the JVM a while back because my work hadnt yet approved Monterey but XCode required it. That was annoying.

But then the problem is that Devs are checking their snazzy webpage on a top of the line Mac, thinking it runs great, meanwhile pcs around the world are being brought to their knees.

So I would say, maintain your old computer and the one before that as testing laptops, so you know what the plebs have to put up with.

> Are all iOS/Mac devs buying new machines every five years?

My company lets you buy a new computer every three years.

This project has given my 2015 MBP a breath of life. It'll probably last long enough for me to replace it with an M3 MBP. That's what I'm hoping for, anyways.

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

Did you have to utter "M3" on the very same day that we finally have M2 MacBook Pros? </grin>

I am now worried about a possible upcoming "M3" announcement in the next week or so.

And I am only half-joking -- a while back I was funded and ready-to-purchase an M1 MacBook Pro and that same day the "M2" announcements hit.

As a result I could not get myself to pull-the-trigger on the M1 purchase.

>>Are all iOS/Mac devs buying new machines every five years?

I buy one every three years - just before my AppleCare expires.

Loaded 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.

It 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.

Well, 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.

I 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.

I've also read that you'd never color-grade a Hollywood blockbuster on their monitor.

> to color grade Hollywood blockbusters

I'm not sure if that's an argument for/against the Mac Pro, considering how terrible Hollywood color grading is. [1]

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mexican-filter

$52k gets you:

- A 2019-era 28-core/56-thread Xeon W that considerably outbenches a contemporary Ryzen Threadripper but isn't anywhere close to a current one.

- Two linked Radeon Pro W6800X Duos, with each Duo having 2x32GB GDDR6 GPUs

- A $2,000 Mac Pro-exclusive, ProRes-decoding-only FPGA accelerator card to simultaneously playback six 8k/30fps ProRes RAW video streams, or 23 RAW or 16 422 streams at 4K, in FCPX and a few other video editing and transcoding apps

- 1.5TB of DDR4 ECC RAM

- 8TB SSD

- Wheels instead of feet

Some of these things are almost redundant. The Afterburner accelerator is a better value on a lower-end Mac Pro because its benefits are narrow and often on CPU-bound work.

And the wheels are still a $400 option on a new Mac Pro.

Your 7950X is a fantastic value at about 2/3 the raw performance of a 5995WX that costs considerably more. You probably don't have or need 1.5TB of RAM, but tasks dealing with multiterabyte-scale data sets (genomics!) can find a use for it.

Your RTX 4080 is great for nearly all applications but short by about 8-64GB of RAM from the kinds of rendering or very large language model training that the target audience of a $52k Mac Pro might want to do with it.

The Mac Pro is a very specialized machine. Windows desktop users aren't generally buying Xeon processors.

Almost no one wants a Mac Pro. It's one of the reasons why it's often left behind by Apple. In this case, Apple still hasn't replaced the Intel CPU with an Apple Silicon one despite being more than two years into the Apple Silicon transition.

> At this point there isn't really any other hardware available, that'd give me a justifiable boost in productivity

I think the key word in there is "me". You're probably like 99.9% of people out there and there's nothing worthwhile in available hardware, but there are always people that have specialized needs.

I mean, you didn't even upgrade your hardware to something with "the best" graphics. You could have gotten an RTX 4090! Why didn't you? Well, it's probably not worth it. Why did you get a Ryzen 9 7950X with 16 cores instead of an EPYC 9654 with 96 cores? Well, probably because you're barely scratching the surface of those 16 Zen 4 cores. I mean, there are so many upgrades you could put into your system. Why didn't you buy 1.5TB of RAM? You probably even bought a motherboard that can't support that much RAM! ;-)

Yea, almost no one wants one of these $52,000 machines. Almost no one wants a Mac Pro. Most people don't want dual Radeon Pro Duo graphics cards - 4 GPUs! Most people don't even buy one discrete GPU today. Most people don't want a machine with a 1,400 watt power supply that can deliver 1,280 watts continuously.

I'd love to know what Apple's sales numbers are on the Mac Pro at all. It starts at $6,000 and feels like other things are a better value at that price. However, maybe you're doing serious video editing on a professional level and time is money - and with the Mac Pro you can buy all sorts of things. Though even there, it looks like the Mac Studio's M1 Ultra is doing better than the Mac Pro - even equipped with Apple Afterburner, a $2,000 card specifically meant to speed up handling ProRes video.

Again, I'd love to know Apple's sales numbers on the Mac Pro, but they were probably decent for a very tiny niche for a while when the Apple Afterburner would be a nice addition to speed up video editing (before Apple Silicon). The Afterburner card could nearly half the amount of time needed to work with ProRes video. But as I said, it's a very tiny niche - a niche we're not in.

That'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.

> 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.

> 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?

How 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.

Who 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.

I paid for an M1 when it came out because I wanted that specific technology combination.

Facebook 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.

I 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

Not 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.

I 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.

Reminds 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.

Having 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.

It 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.

If you bought a $50k Silicon Graphics O2 workstation in 1997, it probably was worth that much in 2000.

No, I was watching at the time... Too many shops needed spares

I wonder how much the metals in it are worth nowadays...

This isn't really about the market value of this machine, it's a very specific trade-in value.

I 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.

I 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.

For 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.

You 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.

He works for MKBHD, they shoot and post 8K videos to Youtube.

I 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.

He's talked about it before, that editing and then uploading time matters so much they used to ship an iMacPro to do post on site. Now they ship around max specced Mac Studios.

And when it comes to editing 8k video, I'm not sure there are faster options than the macs.

Right, for all the users that watch Youtube at wall-sized $40K TVs?

You have the fastest Mac, that's what you do. If you're in an industry where doing something faster generates disproportionately more money, you will find people spend a lot of money on equipment to do their work faster.

You're probably a lot better off boosting productivity this way in a lot of cases before you hire a new FTE.

> I don't understand what one would do with a $52,199 Mac Pro.

You're probably doing the equivalent of whatever someone was using a $50,000 SGI for a quarter century ago.

I 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.

Tech 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?

Followed the comments thread and I wonder: can this 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 :)

It is absolutely a valid contract - if both parties are in the US it shouldn't be too hard to enforce.

lol, no.

Assent, offer/acceptance, consideration, and capacity - looks like a contract to me. I don't see the argument against it.

A careful inspection shows that at least one (but probably both) parties are clearly joking.

Not clear to me. Then again I am not very well versed in internet culture.

It is indeed legally bound

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/contracts-101-make-l...

No judge is going to enforce a contract between somebody selling their employer's computer to another person unless the employer itself agreed.

The buying party would get the true market value of the computer less the cost. It’s not their fault that they seller made an offer they weren’t authorized to make.

It actually is

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/acceptance-of-contra...

That document fails to mention that this does not apply when one or both parties are clearly joking.

Also, actual contract law is a lot more nuanced than what this post on Bob Loblaw's Law Blog will have you believe.

Context: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12...

There's this common thing where nerds expect the law to be written and enforced with mindless precision, like a computer.

Judges aren't robots, and they're not stupid.

Sorting 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-p...

Apple 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.

Sell it on an auction site with a base price with which you’re comfortable.

I'll give you $980.

Are we bidding?

I bid $990

Electronics depreciate fast. That's just that. Not even exclusively Apple thing.

You want something that appreciates? Buy a Rolex.

> 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.

I 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.

> 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.

I'm trying to figure out what "dropped 50x" even means... wouldn't that be like -$2.5 million?

How in the hell can a Mac Pro cost that much? goes to Apple’s online store

I love that they charge $400 for the wheels under the case.

Apple iWheels Pro

Only compatible with the associated iFloor.

> 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.

A car might drop in value by 30% in 3 years, not 30x.

Mechanical parts subject to outdoor conditions/wear are nowhere in the same real as tech hardware.

There are easier ways to say they don't want it, which is what this says.

Someone text John Siracusa with a crying laughing emoji.

The real L here is spending 50k on a Mac Pro. (Not because it’s a mac, just unnecessary)

Remember if you are a business you’d have written off the machine in tax already, so the $1K is really just a bonus

Jerry : 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

Not 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_publink1000...

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