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How much should I offer for this Macbook?

A

Andrew Henry

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 4, 2008
776
0
Here's the deal, this person has a White 2.0ghz CD Macbook/512mb etc. for sale, with no hard drive, the usual wear and tear and such on the computer. It's seems to be in decent condition, the battery also only holds 25% charge.

They are asking $350 for it, which I personally think it too much, seeing as I could get a refurb Mac Mini for just a little bit more money, I have a spare 160 and 250gb hard drive that I could put in it, so that's no biggie, but I was thinking about offering $250 - $275 which I think it reasonable subtracting the cost of a new hard drive + a new battery.

What do you guys think it's worth??

EDIT: Also the MacBook had a liquid spilt on it and the person thought it was dead, but it came "back to life" and is now working perfectly minus the bad battery and no harddrive.
 
I wouldn't purchase it if it were almost free. Offer low, worst is they say no, right? Sounds like you're bartering about buying a probable piece of crap and headache.
 
A Core Duo machine, no HD, bad battery, liquid damage, only 0.5 GB RAM.

I agree with the others. Stay away. Even if you get a new HD, dealing with the rest of these issues isn't worth the effort.
 
I guess I forgot to mention that I obviously wasn't thinking about buying this for a main machine or anything, I'm looking to buy it for a little fixer upper job, something to tinker around with.
 
Try $250 and really push the liquid issue. Make him offer proof that it can boot up, or offer to connect a USB hard drive with an image of OS X to make sure it does.

Really, $300 is a decent deal for this if it's in good condition (maybe a hardware diagnostic is in order as well? Got a bootable copy of Techtools?). You're talking $300, plus $80 for a hdd (but you already have one so your cost is $0), plus maybe $20 for 2GB of Ram (honestly I paid less than that when I upgraded my girlfriends 1.83 CD iMac, check on newegg), plus $50 on amazon for a used battery guaranteed to charge to 95%.

Total cost to you? About $370 for a good laptop. Not bad at all. Honestly, if the computer is in good condition (liquid spill could mean anything from a few drops to a whole glass, so gotta do your homework on this), even $350 is pretty reasonable. You're talking $420 for a fully functioning mac notebook. I would expect to see it see for $500-$600 on eBay once it was restored/upgraded.
 
Andrew Henry said:
I guess I forgot to mention that I obviously wasn't thinking about buying this for a main machine or anything, I'm looking to buy it for a little fixer upper job, something to tinker around with.
Click to expand...

1st, check mac2sell.net and see what price it gives you.
2nd, take about 50%-60% off that price cuz of the liquid spill(who knows how that's affected this computer, it could go dead again anytime). Also check ebay COMPLETED auctions for macbooks and look specifically at ones that say P&R or something along that line, and see what they went for.

I personally wouldn't offer more than $100-$150 with such crazy conditions.
 
No way

No way...
Stay away from that computer...or what is left of that "computer"... you can get much better deals else where... try apples refurbished section on their site. Great deals.
 
I disagree. If it works, then $250-300 is OK. Granted, you've got to carefully inspect everything, since there was a "liquid spill." Clone another Mac's hard drive to an external and take that to test it with. Don't forget to check the CD drive. Memory and hard drives are cheap, and a battery isn't too too much. A 2.0 CD isn't terrible (I used a Mini with one until a few months ago), either. I say go for it, but only if everything checks OK first.
 
js81 said:
I disagree. If it works, then $250-300 is OK. Granted, you've got to carefully inspect everything, since there was a "liquid spill." Clone another Mac's hard drive to an external and take that to test it with. Don't forget to check the CD drive. Memory and hard drives are cheap, and a battery isn't too too much. A 2.0 CD isn't terrible (I used a Mini with one until a few months ago), either. I say go for it, but only if everything checks OK first.
Click to expand...
The only thing is everything could check out okay, and the next day, the next month....something could magically make the mb 'die' again.:eek:
I'd say wait and look for another deal. There's always another person looking to sell their old mb.
 
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