Is Selling and Buying a New MBP Every Year a Good Idea?

I'm back into wanting and really considering a MacBook Pro, like I have been for the last year and a half. The only thing that kept me from getting one instead of my desktop was because of the 8600M GT. I'm going to wait to see what's in the new revision, which is when I would buy. Did anyone here ever see the MBP's resale rate on eBay? You can easily sell a year-old, or older, MBP and only pay a little extra to get a current, new model. I know that the video card in the new MBP won't hold up for as long as I'd like if it isn't at least a 9700M GTS, so selling an old one to get a newer, faster one sounds like a good idea to me.

Does anyone here sell their MBP every year to get a new one? How does it usually go?

 

well,i do something like that. i buy a notebook from US,use it for 5-6 month,and sell it here for 2-3 hundred more then i paid (notebook prices are very high here),so i think it is possible,but you ll lose ~250-350$

 

Lol, that seems like a *very* smart idea... Selling your MBP after a year? Hmm.... Maybe I'll do that. Not with the one I'm typing on though. Unless... someone has a liking for the intel deaccelerator core duo's and an underclocked graphics card chip. ^^

 

I don't recommend it. If you are up to the trouble of posting ads and looking for sellers as well as having to wipe your drive and then backup all your data to a new system and taking extra time and care to set your preferences just the way you like them every year, sure go ahead. It is just something I don't see any point in since the upgrades are usually minor and people usually do it just to have the latest thing and for bragging rights. But whatever works for you is cool too. I just don't recommend it, it is really more trouble than it is worth.

 

I think I'm going to do the same if the new Macbook Pro has a decent GPU...

 

I do the same....

 

^we rock

 

I've been contemplating do that with the next MBP I buy (since this one is dented and that'll probably take a rather large chunk out of the price) since the resell price isn't very much off from the original price. Plus doing it when the new model comes out, and maybe knocking off a little more would be a fast sell since that's usually when people who want used ones go looking for the last-gen stuff.

 

yeah I'm one of those people... I really shouldn't a lot of effort goes into it.

 

I mostly agree. Although, if you are buying the new on locally, you can always just set the old one as a target disk and migrate everything before shipping it off. Still, it is a fair amount of work for little gain. Each iteration is not that much faster or better than the one before it.

 

Say, are you by any chance from Sweden?

 

if i get a laptop, i would generally upgrade every 2 years or generations so that it is actually justified.

 

nope,Armenia

 

I have always kept every computer I've owned for at least 2-3 years before I even considered getting rid of it. Sorry but it's really a ridiculous idea to upgrade every year just for the GPU change. If that's the case then the computer is only being used an expensive game machine and that's a waste.
Also as someone else mentioned there's not enough change every 12 months to justify the trouble of selling it, preparing it for the new owner, backing up all of your stuff and paying the difference for the newer model. There's no guarantee the only price difference will be ~$300 (which is still a lot IMHO) and you may end up paying a lot more if you can't sell your old one for what you are expecting.
Sorry, I'm a geek like the rest of you here but sometimes I have to wonder if people here really appreciate what they have as they are so quick to get rid of it in favor of something new. One of our moderator's can't even afford to upgrade to Leopard even though he won his Mac in a raffle. Not everyone here has zero responsibilities.

 

I should actually probably do the same thing with Singapore/India. Everytime I go back, just take my laptop and sell it there or something. I'd probably end up with a decent profit, as well...

 

Its feasible if you prefer to be up to date, but often I don't find the need to update every year, technology doesn't improve significantly enough for me to justify it.

 

Thank you for saying that. In my perspective, if there are people around the world who wish they had only one thousandth of what we have, the least we can do is appreciate what we do have.

 

I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I acutally wait until my laptop craps out before buying a new one.

 

Most people do this. Only the majority of nerds on these forums resell every year .

 

You have a dell XPS in your signature, why not keep that for the gaming side and get a macbook, or get a macbook pro, completely skip out on any sort of intensive gaming on it and don't expect extreme performance out of it, maybe resell every 2 years instead, that way there are more extreme improvements and you can still probably sell a 2 year old one for close to 1200 bucks.

The average person seems to just acquire more PCs and keep them til they die.

I have a 300-400Mhz Pentium II with 8GB harddrive sitting next to my current PC.

 

The only reason I thought of the idea was because of the great resale value for the current MBPs, which usually go around the new retail value (I saw a one and a half year old 2.33GHz MBP go for $1800). Obviously, I would only want to upgrade for the major updates, and for gaming at least, the difference between each new video card is justifiable. Like in a PC desktop, most people that upgrade their video card spend $200-$300 on average on a new card, so it depends on the upgrade. I guess I'll really have to wait until I see the specs of the new MBP before deciding anything.

 

In Sri Lanka MBP 15.4-2.5Ghz model costs Rs339000/= ($3150)

Here see your self

So if i sale it within one year period , I still can earn nearly $2400-$2700(Depend on condition). I think we have the best resale price

 

i would buy a macbook pro ( at the next refresh in a heartbeat) if selling this m15x was not so hard.

 

In Romania, a 2.4 Penryn Macbook Pro is 6.935,00 RON which is $3068. Check it out: http://store.apple.ro/IMC-Apple-Store/WebObjects/Asto.woa/wa/stockPageByName?name=ro_macbookpro_new

 

Yeah I do the same, except in Venezuela I can sell it for at least $3,500US so I guess I'm a little luckier. I just image the hard drive so I don't waste time with settings, it's pretty seamless.

 

I'm not sure that reselling your MBP after a year means you're any less appreciative of what you have. It's not a crime to want shiny new things, and it's not like you're throwing your old MBP away.

At any rate, as implied by several posts above, depending on where you live, reselling after only 1 year can have significant economic benefits, especially if the profit margin curves off significantly for 2-3 year machines as opposed to 1-year machines. This may be especially true when each iteration has so few upgrades in a single year. I'm not saying this will always be the case, but depending on location and timing, it may well be the case. You may end up saving significantly in the long run if you upgrade every year as opposed to in 2-3.

As for me, I don't really have any personal attachments to my particular MBP. It's nice because it's mine, but the subjective value of it to me isn't really any higher than its objective fair market value (+ the value of my time in setting it up and whatever data I have on it of course). I wouldn't be too upset if I had to trade it in for a new one, assuming it makes economic sense to do so. Of course, being that I'm so incredibly lazy, the cost of my time in setting everything up far exceeds what I might gain from such an upgrade, so I also tend to upgrade only once every 3 years.

 

I buy 1 digital camera, 1 ipod, 1 mobile phone and 1 laptop in the US and sell overseas every year at the end of the year for a profit.

It's nothing about being selfish/wasteful - the stuff is getting reused - sheesh.

It's economics & I always am up-to-date and start with a new free warranty.

 

I'm glad to be in the united states of america =D

 

Down side to America is that we can't make a profit from selling our used MBPs...

 

I don't think we have to look at it as making profit.

I don't really mind losing a couple of hundred dollars, even more, because if you think about it, you've had the computer for a year, you've used it, you've done things with it, so you can't really expect to actually make a profit when ditching the old one and getting a new one.

 

lol, just get the m15x refresh and stay. you dont need to keep on updating and selling, you will end up losing money