I'm selling a retina 2012 MacBook pro on Craigslist and I've gotten nothing but flakey people emailing about it. Nobody has been serious. My asking price was $1200 but someone just offered $900. Would you take it if you were in my position? Is that a reasonable price to sell for or am I settling for too little?
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Would you accept this offer to sell your MacBook? Or am I settling for too little?
- Thread starter Soulweaponry
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It depends on the specs of the rMBP.
What's the specs? CPU, RAM, SSD capacity and GPU.
It was the first retina MacBook. I bought it in 2013 but I think it's considered late 2012 or something. 8gigs ram, 2.3 ghz core i7 with a. 256 gb ssd
Alright, that's a mid-2012 baseline 15" rMBP with a 2.3GHz i7-3615QM, 8GB DDR3L 1600MHz RAM and 256GB mSATA SSD with an NVIDIA 1GB GT 650M GDDR5 GPU.
$1100-1200 sounds just about right IMO.
Ah so you think $900 is a bit low huh. Yeah I've tried selling it for about $1200 on Craigslist and offer up and everybody's been so weird. Really. I thought I made a deal with someone yesterday to meet at 10am and to sell for $1100. Then I email them right as I'm about to leave to meet them and they say "oh yeah I already bought another laptop yesterday. Thanks anyway". Whaaat? Were they just gonna let me go there and be stood up or what?! Craigslist people...they're a different breed.
I've had my macbook on Craigslist for almost two weeks and have pretty much given up hope of selling it.
If I were you, I wouldn't even sell it. It's still a very capable laptop. I'd probably upgrade the SSD to a Transcend JetDrive 480GB and continue using it.
My company-issued 15" rMBP has almost the same specs (it's an early-2013 2.4/8/256) and it runs everything I throw at it well. A VM running simultaneously with Photoshop, and the VM is running WP8 simulator and also has Visual Studio open at the same time.
Memory compression and caching has gone a long way with Yosemite, to the point that 8GB actually acts more like 12GB or more.
I'm really debating with myself at this point whether I even want to sell it or not. My plan was to sell it (since I've been using my iPad so much lately anyway) and next year buy a new MacBook and start learning programming and all kinds of dev related stuff to prepare myself for going to school for computer science, but since Im having such a hard time selling it I may as well keep it and use it for my self study instead of waiting and saving for a new one.
Hopefully the next big OS X update this summer won't slow this baby down. If installing a new ssd isn't that hard, I might jump on that too. Offloading all my crap to external hard drives all the time is getting so time consuming!
It's easy to upgrade the SSD. Buy the upgrade kit from Transcend (they provide the screws, screwdriver, USB-mSATA adapter and a USB3 cable), open up your Mac's back panel and slide the new SSD in, then slide the old SSD into the enclosure for use as an external SSD.
OS X updates will only make HDD Macs act sluggishly. Yosemite on my company-supplied early-2013 15" rMBP runs as fast as it does on my personal late-2013 15" rMBP (2.6/16/1TB/750M).
honestly seem's low to me. I see those going for $1200 on eBay without any issues assuming it's in great shape.
$1200.00 after fees and shipping cost is a lot closer to your $900.00 offer. That goes a lot farther towards a newer model, than a no sale. And others have mentioned, you can keep it, also spend a little to upgrade it.
I would accept the offer.
Highly doubt you'll get anywhere near $1200 for 3 year old tech. Craigslist has lots of flakes/scammers but also plenty of legitimate buyers. How you list your ad is critical. Also your location (big cities, urban centers are much easier for tech transactions) is important. Along w/ the random variables of luck and timing. You should probably lower your expectation to ~$1k if you decide to continue.
If I'm buying, I'm going to ask for less then the asking price. At least 5-10%. So the $900 might be a little low but $1k is not unreasonable. I bought my MBP off Craigslist and it took over a week of haggling to get the price down to where I wanted. See what that model has been selling for on eBay to get an idea of where your price stands. Expect to get slightly less since you're dealing with a smaller population of buyers.
You want to learn development? Your machine is more powerful than an i5 13" rMBP that's currently available. And that's exactly what you'd buy with $1200 or so. The quad core Ivy Bridge is plenty powerful and the 650M is better than the Iris Pro.
If you're not happy with what you're being offered, I would hold out for $1000.
If you're not happy with what you're being offered, I would hold out for $1000.
I stopped selling my used tech gear on CL and opened a seller account on Amazon. I had a CPU, motherboard, RAM and graphics card combo listed on CL for several weeks at $550/bo and never got an offer above $300. I listed the pieces individually on Amazon and sold them for over $800 in a couple days. Since then I listed some other stuff I had laying around and I'm close to $2000 in sales now.
I had one buyer who wanted to return a video card because he claimed it wouldn't fit his system, but once I explained he'd have to pay return shipping and a 20% restocking fee, he decided to keep it.
It takes like three weeks to get paid, but it's not like Amazon is going to make off with your funds. They take about 9% in fees, plus the shipping amount doesn't always cover the cost of shipping and insurance, but it's close enough. It's a small price to pay to avoid the CL flakes.
Just look up the item you want to sell, copy the ASIN, and use that to list your item. You can specify your price and any condition issues or options. You need to be quick about shipping or they will suspend you, but I drive by two POs on the way to work, so no problem.
Since buyers can pay via CC, they're usually willing to spend more than locals on CL. I mean, how many people can put their hands on $1200 in cash?
Good luck.
Anyone attempting to buy an expensive Apple laptop from CL should easily be able to get that cash. Not very hard to walk into your bank/credit union and withdraw the necessary funds. I've sold several laptops previously on CL and had great experiences every-time. I only deal in cash and since I'm careful with whom I choose to do business with, they have never had any problems coming with the agreed upon amount. You can also end up making far more than on Amazon and eBay, since you cut out the middle-man entirely and will get the extra $ the buyer would've had to pay for shipping/handling/insurance fees. Plus there won't be any contested issues later since the potential buyer will be able to fully examine and operate the machine during the meeting to ensure that everything is to their complete satisfaction.
I ended up selling to someone from Craigslist for $900. Went smooth. I was actually shocked I was even able to sell it I was getting so many lowball and bizarre offers. "Hey. Wanna trade for a razor scooter"? Uh yeah. No. I only trade for cash.
I think maybe next time I'll just keep my old computers instead of selling them.
I think maybe next time I'll just keep my old computers instead of selling them.
This Craigslist thing has come up so often on this Forum...
OK, I can't speak for everywhere in the world. But everywhere I've lived, Craigslist has a VERY specific connotation. Craigslist is a garage sale. It's where people sell things they don't care about because they want an easy sale. There's high risk factor, and as a result, most people I know won't buy something on Craigslist unless it's at least 30% below market value. Many people go to Craigslist expecting to get things for 10% market price, because they know the person selling just wants to get rid of it no hassle.
The next level up is something called "freecycle", where people just come by and pick up your stuff and take it away.
I keep telling people - if you want market value for something, you HAVE to use eBay. The downside of this is it could take a solid month's work to set up the listing, mail the item, get the money released. But that's the choice.
BOTTOM LINE: you never get market value for things on Craigslist. In fact, it's so bloated that unless you have a featured item, no one may ever see it. More and more, Craiglist is being dominated by "free" sales like freecycle.
Again, can't speak for everywhere in the world, but it seems a lot of areas have this connotation for Craigslist.
OK, I can't speak for everywhere in the world. But everywhere I've lived, Craigslist has a VERY specific connotation. Craigslist is a garage sale. It's where people sell things they don't care about because they want an easy sale. There's high risk factor, and as a result, most people I know won't buy something on Craigslist unless it's at least 30% below market value. Many people go to Craigslist expecting to get things for 10% market price, because they know the person selling just wants to get rid of it no hassle.
The next level up is something called "freecycle", where people just come by and pick up your stuff and take it away.
I keep telling people - if you want market value for something, you HAVE to use eBay. The downside of this is it could take a solid month's work to set up the listing, mail the item, get the money released. But that's the choice.
BOTTOM LINE: you never get market value for things on Craigslist. In fact, it's so bloated that unless you have a featured item, no one may ever see it. More and more, Craiglist is being dominated by "free" sales like freecycle.
Again, can't speak for everywhere in the world, but it seems a lot of areas have this connotation for Craigslist.
I've got a couple decades in this business.
Your current Macbook is way more powerful than you need for your intended use. Almost all of your work will be done inside a terminal window or a text editor. You could use an old white Powerbook and be just fine. Beginning programming is not demanding of compute power or storage.
You will NOT be writing video games of video editing apps, just simple stuff that will run fine of a 10 year old machine.