imac G4 deflation

S

stizz

gorilla beta tester
With the release of the imac G5's, what will happen to the price of swivel based G4 imacs?

I ask because I'm about to buy a fully loaded imac G4 800 Mhz (15 inch screen)
with airport card
with half a gig of ram and the super drive
plus a free epson printer and apple speakers

$900

Is that a good deal? Can we expect to see better deals? I saw several auctions on ebay end early because the price didn't get high enough.

What are yall's thoughts?
 
I wouldn't really encourage you to go for that. I mean its a 800MHz G4 imac... thats pretty old(and expensive)! Plus for 400$ more you could get a 1.6GHz G5! A G5!! That's huge! Plus its gonna stay with you a lot longer! I really think you should go for the G5 iMac if you can push your budget.
 
fryke said:
that 800 MHz model is pretty old for 900$, isn't it?
Click to expand...

on where you live. The airport card is worth 150 all by itself. The machine has superdrive, 512 ram (though I'd up that) speakers and an epson maybe-it-will-printer. I'd snap it up for nine bills here in Cairo.

The g5 is likely to be selling for two grand for the bottom of the line here.
 
Its a top of the line imac (2 years old?) with dvd burner etc for my mother in law. (it'll be replacing a win98 pc). We looked at the G5's for 400 more, but she gets less ram, no dvd, no airport card and no extras (printer speakers) i assumed this was a good deal for her. now I'm worried.
 
I'd look around for a while. You might find similar priced deals for a 17" model with at least 1 GHz processor speed soon.
 
That seems kinda high. I was contemplating helping my mother sell her practically new 17" iMac for not much more than that. I wasn't going to be selling it with a printer or anything, but those are so cheap these days anyway, I've found it's not worth even shipping the freebies.
 
That's about £500 in the UK. IMHO, that is a good deal seeing as it comes with a lot of accessories. Mind you we have to pay 17.5% VAT on all products so you might be getting ripped off if you're in the US since (IIRC) you don't have VAT there.
 
Thanks for all the great responses. Based on other factors:

The ebay auction for this ended with a high bid of 911

we emailed him, he said his reserve had been too high, would take 900.

No shipping, no taxes. Its a local pickup.

Methinks the above factors coupled with the fact that it will be used as an office/internet machine for an old lady makes this a good deal. Plus time is a huge factor. She is currently without internet, that means she calls us multiple times daily. If I buy this today she will leave me alone ;)
 
Hi stizz.

I don't think we should let eBay prices be our used Mac market/price guide. I once sold a Mac that I thought (at the time) was worth no more than $500 - 600 and it sold for $1100! I felt terrible, but the buyer was perfectly happy. I guess it is something about the bidding war mentality drives people to spend more than they should and be happy about "winning" no matter what the cost. I buy a new Mac about every two years. I always go for the mid model when they have been about about 4 - 6 months and this seems to work well for me. I can sell the old machine before it is worthless and put that $ toward the new machine without breaking the bank. I have done this with about 7 macs in a row and it seems to work out. In the above example I sold a G4 450 for $1100 (would have been happy with $600!) and got a DP 1 Ghz for about $1600. At that time the DP 1 GHz was the middle model in that line and the DP 1.25 was about a grand more, the 866 DP a few hundred less.

Now that I mention it, it seems time to think about selling the DP 1 GHz!
 
karavite, so are you also proposing that 900$ is too much for this particular package?
 
What he basically meant was to be aware of the fact that eBay prices aren't always 'normal' prices... I'd look around what you could get for 700-1000 USD. I'm sure you'd find a better machine for the same price.
 
I thought you already bought it, so I didn't say anything. IMO, it is too much for that and you might as well have spent a little more for a brand new machine, but we all have our own cost-benefit analysis and what makes us happy is ultimately up to each of us! P.S. I think eBay is a fantastic place to SELL things, but for purchasing anything with some demand, by its very auction based nature prices will be high.
 
Ok, well, I think this thread has convinced me to sell of the 17" iMac I mentioned earlier. Does anyone have experience in grouping items together? I have the iMac, a Panasonic DigitalVideo camera, Handspring (color), Umax flatbed USB scanner, Kodak digital camera and possibly a 20GB iPod. I figured it'd be a nice way for someone to move over to a new Mac and really use iLife '04.

Is it a bad idea to group stuff together like that?

I'm thinking with so many people liking the older iMac better, which I have to admit, I really love that arm that allows such fluid movement, and that the new one's won't be available for a while soon and will probably be pushed back, as with every other Apple product, it should keep the current line's value up a bit.
 
It depends on the buyer. There are people who don't like this bundled stuff. If you find someone who actually needs all of it: Great. But you might get a better price if you sell the stuff as 'singles'...
 
Go3iverson, I'm very interested in the aforementioned package for my mum - what kind of money would you be looking at for the whole package right now?

Even just out of curiosity?
 
texanpenguin....

Send me a PM, I don't know what the rules are around here, but I know most places don't want their discussion boards being turned into a global market and I don't want to be guilty of doing it myself! :)

Thank you for your interest though!
 
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