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Ebay listing that made me chuckle

salamanderjuice said:
Is that a pre-2016 15" MBP too? Are they insane?
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That, my fellow MR forum member, is an early 2011 17-inch MBP with the notorious Radeon GPU whose namesake gave birth to Radeongate. 🙂


TheShortTimer said:
That's the only scenario that seems plausible here.
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The only other plausible possibility, to borrow a page from the academy, is this is a seller which jacks up prices as supplies run down to one, to make it so that no one buys at that price as they scare up some more units to be able to sell at a lower price again.

If this is the case, it’d be like the published dissertation or out of print, hardbound scholarship which, as each unsold copy (of what was a small number to begin with) remains, the price goes up by tens of percentage points until the very last copy available for sale anywhere is selling for several hundreds of dollars.

For the scholar writing their own scholarship, knowing the data and/or citation you need is on a copy which is selling for $500, and the nearest copy available for inter-library-loan is on another continent… and Google Books scanned it! (but you can’t browse it), is one of those infuriating experiences.
 
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TheShortTimer said:
That's the only scenario that seems plausible here.
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Take a look at the revision history. There you'll find it was first listed around March 2021 and since then it has been heavily revised. It likely started off as something else which had 18 sales and then modified to this to make it look as if people had bought 18 of this item.

Credit goes to Luke Miani who mentioned this trick in one of his videos.
 
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::“…but why…”:: gif [encore]

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Amethyst1 said:
After I mentioned wanting to play with Samsung's first SSD here, I found a resource that revealed other models of the same family. Fortunately, eBay is my friend... or not:
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Oooff - and that's without even considering the whopping shipping costs. 😮

Amethyst1 said:
(Anyway, I'll stop boring everyone with prehistoric SSDs now 😀)
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I'm not bored - but you could spin it off into a separate thread where you can indulge yourself. 😀
 
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Even more expensive than the other listing that I referred to here but at least this time the seller has waived the £10 GBP collection fee! 😀

HAMwkfU.png


Make an offer eh? Hmmm perhaps they'll take off £5...
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Just like this scuzzy thing. I think I have one of those, but I wasn’t aware that it’s worth its weight in gold. 🤣
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Plextor products have a great reputation for quality but not great enough to even contemplate paying that amount of money. These listings are an infinite source of amusement and sometimes, bemusement.

Here's another bemusing example but on a much lower scale, comparatively. A 6-core 2013 Mac Pro with 64GB and a 1TB SSD for £218 GBP or best offer. The seller describes it as faulty but neglects to elaborate as to what exactly the fault is. This is consistent with the other faulty items they have for sale which also lack any information regarding their problems.
 
weckart said:
Noticed that the price of these dongles have soared. The corresponding TB-ethernet ones still go cheaply. Anyone have any idea why people are shelling out so much for the FW adapter? Surely, for that money they could get one of the earlier multi-port Caldigit etc docks with a lot more to offer?
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I noticed this as well. I actually bought an official Apple Thunderbolt->Firewire adapter from Amazon in October 2022, when it was £29, which at the time seemed exorbitant. I was going to buy a second adapter, but as you point out they're no longer on sale and the price has shot up.

As other commentators have pointed out it was specifically so I could connect my MOTU 828 audio interface - the chap at the top here:
640px-MOTU_Audio_Interfaces_7849.jpg

...to the second-hand 2013 Mac Pro I had recently bought. The MOTU 828 came out in 2001 and was one of the fire ever Firewire audio interfaces, and I still use it as my main audio interface. The 2408 at the bottom uses "audiowire", which was a proprietary standard that used Firewire cables.

The dongle was a niche thing and Apple seems to have discontinued it, and it appears that it was never cloned by Chinese eBay sellers, so if you want to use Firewire gear with a modern Mac you're stuffed.

It reminds me of the palaver with ADC-DVI monitor adapters. If you wanted to connect a translucent plastic G4-era ADC LCD monitor to a DVI port Apple sold an adapter. But if you wanted to connect a DVI monitor to an ADC port - which should have been technically easy, because it was the same basic digital protocol - you were stuffed, because Apple didn't sell an adapter and the Chinese market wasn't interested. Batteries for old digital cameras are like that as well.
 
AshleyPomeroy said:
The dongle was a niche thing and Apple seems to have discontinued it, and it appears that it was never cloned by Chinese eBay sellers, so if you want to use Firewire gear with a modern Mac you're stuffed.
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No you're not. There are several Thunderbolt docks that feature FireWire 800 ports and they're available for sale on eBay right now and they offer greater functionality than a dongle for a lower price. One example is the Belkin F4U055, which I purchased from eBay relatively inexpensively. 🙂
 
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