Look, it's still a very good, capable machine. But even with all of the upgrades you're going to get nowhere near $2000. There's just not the demand for it and it is outdated. This is the truth I'm afraid. Macs depreciate extremely quickly, contrary to popular belief.
At the moment it looks like you're refuting people's points until you find a poster who will agree with you. That's not going to happen.
And if the owner thinks it's such a good machine, why does he want to sell it? So he can buy the Retina?
The owner wants to sell it so he can buy a refurbished 27" iMac either of the Late 2012 variety or of the Late 2013 (current non-retina) variety.
Macs, at least in my experience in selling them, don't depreciate that quickly. Six months ago, I could've gotten $1000 for a lower-end Mid 2010 17" MacBook Pro (i.e. the only model that ever had any flavor of Core i5). The only thing that would have anyone feeling like the machine is outdated is the lack of a retina display, which few consumers even are apt to appreciate or even know the difference. You'd be surprised by how many people I've explained the difference to (and still don't get it).
In any event, as it was when Apple sold the customization option brand new, the 2.7GHz Ivy Bridge i7 with 8MB of L3 Cache option was geared at people who use their MacBook Pro for production; more a tool than a Facebooking machine. The seller seems convinced that it is that same target audience that will want this machine. Especially since there are a lot of common tools that Pros STILL use that either still lack retina display support or will never get retina display support. Similarly, many creatives still use drive bays. Having a laptop that can essentially have a 1.25TB Fusion Drive is also fairly useful (especially when, unlike Apple-supplied Fusion Drives, the SSD portion is larger than 128GB).
I have the 2.7, Hi-Res Anti Glare, 8GB RAM, 1TB HD - blah blah - 7 Months AppleCare - same machine as yours except for the RAM, SSD, little AppleCare. Mine has been posted in CL for $1300 for 30 days in a market of 1 Million+ people - no real bits - best offer is like $1000. I wont sell for less than $1200 - my need to go to eBay.
I told him that eBay is probably where he should go next. We'll try to exhaust some other avenues first, but yeah, that's seeming like the best bet. A shame that they now, in addition to the listing fee, take 10% of your winnings.
Only worth what people are willing to pay in the used market, regardless of how much you think it may be worth compared to whats available now. I think realistically you're looking at around $1500 max on that machine with the upgrades included. Any more and people can get rMBPs.
Yes, but there are functional differences between rMBPs and cMBPs that prompted those that could've gotten the former in 2012 to instead get the latter. I am one such person myself (and no, again, I'm not selling my machine). Also, the speed differences between Haswell and Ivy Bridge, especially when Apple doesn't offer a 15" rMBP with a Haswell/Crystalwell processor that has 8MB of Cache.
Also, many of the pro users are not yet jumping on Yosemite and are usually one or two releases of OS X behind. You cannot run Mountain Lion on a Haswell based MacBook Pro at all and that's often critical in some production environments. For consumers, yes, this won't be an issue. But then again, as stated before, consumers wouldn't appreciate the opti-bay and the fact that there is both a 7200RPM 750GB hard drive and a 480GB SSD.
Maybe recent Macs do. But depreciation was found to be historically slow. I sold a 2009 MB (metal unibody) in 2011 for $700, paid $1500, and had a physically broken but working trackpad. Comparatively, I sold an unopened $650 PC laptop from 2012 in the same year for $400. Which one lost the most value?
Assuming it's not a stolen one, any reason for him wanting to sell would be acceptable. I am not here to judge the OP.
eBay? Do you really enjoy receiving so many scam attempts or just get ripped off by shady buyers?
On the other hand, if the offers are so low, maybe you have too much competition, or live in a poor city.
I would take a faster machine without Retina. But clearly people don't seem too concerned about power on the used market.
People on this site tend to have opinions that gravitate toward the newest and the best, regardless of anything beyond that. The differences between the non-retina 15" from 2012 and the retina from 2012 and early 2013 are minimal (it's just a design changeover that mostly sucked anyway). Even the differences between that same non-retina 15" and the CURRENT 15" MacBook Pro of current aren't that pronounced. Plus GeForce GT 650M is still better than Intel Iris Pro for the lower-end MacBook Pro, which is where most of this thread's comparisons are going towards anyway.
