What would you bid?

slackula

I currently own a flat panel iMac 2 which I love. But have been thinking lately about purchasing a PowerBook or iBook for portability. Now one may have kind of "fallen into my lap". I work for a large insurance company. Salvaged items are put up for bid in our intranet. A 12" Powerbook has recently been recovered after a theft, and so now must be sold as the original owner has already been paid for the loss.



Here is the posted description of the item: "Recovered theft. Appears to be in proper working condition. 867 PowerPC G4 Processor. 640 MB DDR 266 SDRAM. 60 GB Hard Drive. Combo Drive Optical Drive. No AirPort Card."



The four photos posted seem to indicate the unit is in excellent condition and even comes with all of the required cables, disks, and manuals.



The kicker is, the system is bascally a "silent auction" via e-mail rather than a proxy bidding system as is in place on eBay. So if you place a bid and are the high bidder, you must pay the full price you bid. Just say for instance you bid $1,100 and are the high bidder. You'd have to pay that price, even if the second higest bidder bid only $900.



They only tell you if you win or lose the auction afer it closes in about a week. Everthing else is pretty tight-lipped. They don't put out a lot of information on the bidding process as eBay does, for instance.



I'm trying to decide how much what to bid on the item. I'd like to try to get it with a reasonable bid. But then I'm looking at the new G4 iBooks thinking I could just get one of those rather than putting too high of a bid in on this item.



What would you bid for the item?



Oh, and why on eBay do PowerBooks like this one go for more than the brand new iBook G4's? They seem to have relatively similar specs.



Thanks for all of your input!

cubedude

I personally would bid 1,200. Maybe 1,300. It's got a good amount of RAM and a much bigger hard disk than an iBook, so I think that's a good price.

bauman

Really? I think I would try a little lower... like around 1100. But it's a tough call.



How many people are involved in this? Is your office Mac or PC?

alcimedes

bah, bid $800.



if you win you'll be really happy. if you don't who cares.



otherwise you'll always wonder if you got screwed. in a large office like that i'm guessing it's mostly PC people. odds are people won't bid it too high.



besides, if a PC person wins that's just one more convert.

kingofsomewherehot

The same iBook G4 (640 ram, 60G drive, 800mhtz CPU - close enough) can be hadfor $1324 on the Apple Store.



Hard to believe a "theft recovery" contains all the manuals, system CD's, cables, etc ... might check on that !



So for $1300 you can get brand-new, with warranty and all CD's, etc... I'd have a hard time paying more than $1000 for the used PBook ... If it were my I'd do as suggested above and bid $800 ... how can you go wrong ? ... (If most people in your office don't know the difference between a PowerBook and a GrannySmith, then they probably wouldn't bid more than that anyway ..."hey, i can get a brand new Dell for 800 !")

slackula

Thanks for your posts so far! The replies so far kind of hit the two sides of the argument that have been bouncing around in my puny little head.



Our offices are all PC environments. So one wouldn't think the price would be driven up too high. However, all it takes is one computer savvy geek who decides to try to buy it knowing he or she can re-sell it on eBay to drive up the going price. That personal might bid over $1,000 knowing s/he can likely re-sell it on eBay for over that amount. That would squash the $800 bid getting it for me.



Also, my wife is a teacher at the local high school, so if we opt for the brand new iBook G4, we'd get a discount there. Plus, the other day I received one of those e-mails from Apple offering a $100 discount on any purchase of $999 or more by 12-15-03.



Thanks again for the input, and feel free to add more. This is fun and just interesting to bounce off you all!







P.S.--Thought there are just a couple hundred people in our office location, we've got about 40,000 employees nationawide. However, surely only a very small fraction even bother checking the salvage site with the "auctions".



P.P.S.--On the manuals. cables, disks thing....I imagine what happened is that when our company told the original owner we recovered the item, he or she just gave our company all of the accompanying "stuff" as s/he has probably already purchased a new unit with the money we paid the insured for the loss.