Old machines get a life past their sell-by date
My husband's old steam-powered laptop, an IBM ThinkPad 600X, recently found a buyer on his company's intranet. Much to my disbelief, he managed to sell it for HK$4,000.
I didn't think there was any resale value for an antique Pentium II 500-megahertz system with 128 megabytes of Ram, a 13.3-inch thin-film transistor display, no graphics card and a 12-gigabyte hard disk.
Puzzled that there could be a second-hand market for laptops when the prices of the latest models have come down to under HK$10,000, I did some research.
I found out that the market for second-hand, refurbished laptops is thriving in Hong Kong, and even 1994 models can rake in several thousand dollars.
The owner of a computer store in Windsor House, Causeway Bay, told me his shop sold more refurbished than new laptops in an average month.
He said the 'second-hand' market did not consist entirely of used laptops. Many were factory-refurbished or old stock.
'They are as good as new,' he said.
At the Apple Design House on the 12th floor of Windsor House, a second-hand G4 Apple PowerBook with a 15-inch display was selling for HK$10,000. When it was introduced last year, the PowerBook G4 sold for more than twice that.
Computers, like cars, quickly depreciate in value. Six-month-old laptops cost a couple of thousand dollars less.
Unlike older Macintoshes, which have a relatively high resale value because of their limited number and popularity, old Windows laptops are considered 'big' or 'ugly'. But a 1989 Toshiba laptop, a machine about as svelte as a mini-fridge running Microsoft DOS and WordStar, was recently snapped up for HK$3,600 on the local auction Web site Red-dots.com. A more advanced model of the ThinkPad my husband sold, the ThinkPad 600E with a 13.1-inch display and 64MB of Ram, is going on Red-dots.com for HK$3,400.
The ThinkPad 600 series is obsolete. One would be hard-pressed to find parts for it and, even if you did, they would probably be costly. A ThinkPad 600 6x DVD-Rom drive on Red-dots.com is going for HK$560, or more that most new higher-speed DVD-Rom drives.
With so many auction sites, the Internet is one of the best places to sell old laptops.
I also saw it in a shop at the Wan Chai Computer Mall selling for HK$4,500 with a year's warranty and an external CD-RW/DVD-Rom.
I bought the 1.8kg Armada M300 a year after it was first introduced for HK$10,000, with software thrown in. Its launch price was HK$16,000.
To put all this in perspective, IBM's latest ThinkPad, the R40e - featuring Intel's Pentium M chip at 1.8 gigahertz, a 20GB hard disk, 128MB of Ram, built-in Ethernet and an integrated 24x CD-Rom and running Windows XP - is priced at HK$8,488.
Keep in mind that the main advantage the latest laptops have over older models is battery life, especially for the new Pentium M systems, which boast upwards of two hours of use.
