The Absurd World of Used MacBook Pricing

If you're looking at five six hundred dollars to get yourself out of this problem well here's what i would recommend if you were in this situation. The parts that make up a macbook such as this are generally more valuable than the completed macbook itself. It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense when you think about it logically but when you look at a logic board for a computer like this those tend to run a little bit more than two hundred dollars. A top case such as this in very good condition with a nice battery that still holds a charge, you're looking at another maybe 130 dollars for that. This computer has a 512 gigabyte ssd so you could probably get 70 bucks for that. Another 30 for the bottom case and weirdly enough you could still probably get 175 or 200 dollars for a display that's damaged like this.

That's 640 in parts for a non-functional macbook that i paid 240 dollars for ladies and gentlemen welcome to the absolutely insane world of used macbook pricing. It doesn't make a single bit of sense you're talking about a computer that has a really messed up display that has 600 worth of parts in it on a computer that itself if it were fixed would only be 600 so it's absolutely insane to me that a broken macbook is worth the same if you part it out as a working macbook but that's the world we live in folks. So if you're in a situation like this where your screen is somehow defective and you wanted to repair it don't spend 500 bucks on a display buy a new computer and then take your old one apart now that definitely seems like a life hack and i think it might actually be worth exploring for a full video experiment could we buy a working macbook take it apart and sell it and then make money without really having to do anything. Let me know in the comments below and of course subscribe if you want to see that video.

But setting that little life hack aside for a future video this is really sad because the vast majority of people aren't going to be like you and me who enjoy working on computers who want to extend the lifespan of their old 2009 macbook that's been sitting in the closet and you know you juice it up with an ssd and some extra ram and you got yourself a great secondary or primary device or you take a macbook like this and you repair it and you get a good deal and you feel good because you saved this from a landfill. The vast majority of people aren't going to do that if you're the quote unquote average consumer and this happens to your macbook pro you're going to go to the apple store they're going to say well that's going to be 700 and you're either going to be absolutely robbed with an expensive repair like that or you're going to throw it away or if you're lucky you're going to sell it on ebay and then it gets to live on with someone like you and me but that doesn't happen that often a lot of these computers end up at recycling facilities that are sometimes going to part them out and save what usable components there are sometimes though they're just gonna get scrapped and that's a tremendous waste because even though this is an eight-year-old macbook pro and it's probably lived a pretty long life it doesn't need to be scrapped. There are plenty of useful and recyclable and valuable components in here but with businesses and schools when stuff like this happens quite often they just get thrown away and that is an absolute tragedy.

It's sad to see computers like this go to waste when there's plenty of people that could really use them but well that's what happens when apple restricts the ability to repair and you end up with these supply constraints that make computers like this uneconomical to fix. Fortunately hopefully we've sort of found a little bit of a way around that in terms of buying these and then distributing the parts in a useful way contributing to the parts community by selling this for parts and in fact one way or another this computer's not gonna die i haven't quite figured out what i'm gonna do with this yet i mainly just bought it because i was like okay good condition with all the box and accessories for 240 bucks there must be something i can do with this computer so if you have an idea for what we could do with this let me know in the comments below. This computer is not going to die under my watch so with that thank you guys for watching this video let me know what your take is on this whole dilemma with expensive macbook displays and of course don't forget to like comment and subscribe follow me on twitter lukemiani and don't forget to check out my subreddit which you'll find linked in the description below. And with that i'll see you all in the next video

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this box is a late 2013 15-inch macbook pro and in a lot of ways it's like any other retina macbook pro out there except in one crucial way this macbook has a defect that renders it almost completely uneconomical to repair and this is an issue that doesn't just affect a late 2013 macbook pro but almost any macbook from the past seven or eight years so in today's video we're going to talk about why this is such a huge problem so upon first glance this looks like any other normal old 15-inch retina macbook pro and in fact this particular one is a late 2013 upgraded model so this has the 2.3 gigahertz quad core i7 16 gigabytes of ram a 512 gigabyte ssd and the upgraded nvidia gt 750m graphics it's a fantastic computer i've had one of these for about four years now even though it's you know getting on eight years old now these things are still fantastic and this one came with all of its original accessories like the charger it even has the microfiber cloth that's a big win you know i love my microfiber cloths and you may be wondering how much i paid for this very nice very very good condition late 2013 macbook pro well folks this was 240 seems like a great deal right well before you go congratulating me let's go ahead and open up the screen now you might not be able to see it from that distance but there is a catastrophic issue with this display that stems from a really common problem that plagues a lot of macbook pros even the recent ones like 2018 uh and that is the screen delamination now that's not the catastrophic problem that i referred to in the title and intro of this video that's really more of the catalyst in this particular situation there's not a whole lot you can do to get rid of this display peeling problem so really what people have started to do is remove the display coating completely essentially what happened with this particular computer was the previous owner tried to do that and in doing so liquid has gotten into the display and irreparably damaged it if you look closely at the screen there's a massive watermark on the lower right hand side and on the left there's a streak of dim pixels that have reacted to the water that goes from the bottom left across the middle of the screen so essentially this display assembly is ruined there's no way to fix both the delamination and now this liquid ingress which really couldn't be fixed anyway because this is a laminated display so the this display assembly is completely toast now that doesn't sound like that big a deal because quite frankly it's an easy job to replace the display of a macbook pro you pull off the bottom there's two or three connectors on each side and then six screws hold the display on and you can pop it off however the problem is not the difficulty of the repair but the cost of the repairs see the displays for these macbook pros even eight-year-old ones like this are astronomically catastrophically expensive a quick search on ebay if you want to find a nice one that matches the otherwise very very excellent condition of this macbook pro can easily be five or six hundred dollars that is insane you can buy this entire computer for about six hundred dollars and that's basically the cost of the display so if you think of it like this right imagine you have a car that's worth five thousand dollars and you end up blowing an engine and the engine replacement costs let's say forty five hundred dollars that is a car that would be considered mechanically totaled because the cost of repairing it is basically null and void when you could basically get another car for that amount of money that's basically what's going on with this macbook pro this would be uneconomical for me to repair because you know 250 is not a lot of money for one of these that's a crazy good deal if the display worked but if i wanted to buy a display to fix this computer i would be in it close to seven hundred dollars so obviously i'm not going to make a profit on that and this is a problem that's going to continue to get worse because as the newer macbook pros age they're going to quickly age into this problem anything with a retina display has this problem because the displays are so hard to find and they're also the most common thing to break so you've got this incredibly imbalanced system where there's very few displays and a lot of people who want to replace their displays and are like well it's stupid to buy a whole new computer and generate all of this waste of buying another computer when i could just repair the display on the one that i already have but if it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense now there is one potential angle where you could maybe make something like this work like let's say for example that you are the original owner of this macbook pro right you've bought this it's delaminated the screen is now ruined and you're you're trying to figure out what to do so 500 bucks is what you're looking at for a screen replacement or maybe 600 if you want to get a nice example of a similar computer like this that's a really tough pill to swallow you're talking about an eight-year-old macbook pro with just one little cosmetic issue and you're looking at five six hundred dollars to get yourself out of this problem well here's what i would recommend if you were in this situation the parts that make up a macbook such as this are generally more valuable than the completed macbook itself it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense when you think about it logically but when you look at a logic board for a computer like this those tend to run a little bit more than two hundred dollars a top case such as this in very good condition with a nice battery that still holds a charge you're looking at another maybe 130 dollars for that this computer has a 512 gigabyte ssd so you could probably get 70 bucks for that another 30 for the bottom case and weirdly enough you could still probably get 175 or 200 dollars for a display that's damaged like this that's 640 in parts for a non-functional macbook that i paid 240 dollars for ladies and gentlemen welcome to the absolutely insane world of used macbook pricing it doesn't make a single bit of sense you're talking about a computer that has a really messed up display that has 600 worth of parts in it on a computer that itself if it were fixed would only be 600 so it's absolutely insane to me that a broken macbook is worth the same if you part it out as a working macbook but that's the world we live in folks so if you're in a situation like this where your screen is somehow defective and you wanted to repair it don't spend 500 bucks on a display buy a new computer and then take your old one apart now that definitely seems like a life hack and i think it might actually be worth exploring for a full video experiment could we buy a working macbook take it apart and sell it and then make money without really having to do anything let me know in the comments below and of course subscribe if you want to see that video but setting that little life hack aside for a future video this is really sad because the vast majority of people aren't going to be like you and me who enjoy working on computers who want to extend the lifespan of their old 2009 macbook that's been sitting in the closet and you know you juice it up with an ssd and some extra ram and you got yourself a great secondary or primary device or you take a macbook like this and you repair it and you get a good deal and you feel good because you saved this from a landfill the vast majority of people aren't going to do that if you're the quote unquote average consumer and this happens to your macbook pro you're going to go to the apple store they're going to say well that's going to be 700 and you're either going to be absolutely robbed with an expensive repair like that or you're going to throw it away or if you're lucky you're going to sell it on ebay and then it gets to live on with someone like you and me but that doesn't happen that often a lot of these computers end up at recycling facilities that are sometimes going to part them out and save what usable components there are sometimes though they're just gonna get scrapped and that's a tremendous waste because even though this is an eight-year-old macbook pro and it's probably lived a pretty long life it doesn't need to be scrapped there are plenty of useful and recyclable and valuable components in here but with businesses and schools when stuff like this happens quite often they just get thrown away and that is an absolute tragedy it's sad to see computers like this go to waste when there's plenty of people that could really use them but well that's what happens when apple restricts the ability to repair and you end up with these supply constraints that make computers like this uneconomical to fix fortunately hopefully we've sort of found a little bit of a way around that in terms of buying these and then distributing the parts in a useful way contributing to the parts community by selling this for parts and in fact one way or another this computer's not gonna die i haven't quite figured out what i'm gonna do with this yet i mainly just bought it because i was like okay good condition with all the box and accessories for 240 bucks there must be something i can do with this computer so if you have an idea for what we could do with this let me know in the comments below this computer is not going to die under my watch so with that thank you guys for watching this video let me know what your take is on this whole dilemma with expensive macbook displays and of course don't forget to like comment and subscribe follow me on twitter lukemiani and don't forget to check out my subreddit which you'll find linked in the description below and with that i'll see you all in the next video soin this box is a late 2013 15-inch macbook pro and in a lot of ways it's like any other retina macbook pro out there except in one crucial way this macbook has a defect that renders it almost completely uneconomical to repair and this is an issue that doesn't just affect a late 2013 macbook pro but almost any macbook from the past seven or eight years so in today's video we're going to talk about why this is such a huge problem so upon first glance this looks like any other normal old 15-inch retina macbook pro and in fact this particular one is a late 2013 upgraded model so this has the 2.3 gigahertz quad core i7 16 gigabytes of ram a 512 gigabyte ssd and the upgraded nvidia gt 750m graphics it's a fantastic computer i've had one of these for about four years now even though it's you know getting on eight years old now these things are still fantastic and this one came with all of its original accessories like the charger it even has the microfiber cloth that's a big win you know i love my microfiber cloths and you may be wondering how much i paid for this very nice very very good condition late 2013 macbook pro well folks this was 240 seems like a great deal right well before you go congratulating me let's go ahead and open up the screen now you might not be able to see it from that distance but there is a catastrophic issue with this display that stems from a really common problem that plagues a lot of macbook pros even the recent ones like 2018 uh and that is the screen delamination now that's not the catastrophic problem that i referred to in the title and intro of this video that's really more of the catalyst in this particular situation there's not a whole lot you can do to get rid of this display peeling problem so really what people have started to do is remove the display coating completely essentially what happened with this particular computer was the previous owner tried to do that and in doing so liquid has gotten into the display and irreparably damaged it if you look closely at the screen there's a massive watermark on the lower right hand side and on the left there's a streak of dim pixels that have reacted to the water that goes from the bottom left across the middle of the screen so essentially this display assembly is ruined there's no way to fix both the delamination and now this liquid ingress which really couldn't be fixed anyway because this is a laminated display so the this display assembly is completely toast now that doesn't sound like that big a deal because quite frankly it's an easy job to replace the display of a macbook pro you pull off the bottom there's two or three connectors on each side and then six screws hold the display on and you can pop it off however the problem is not the difficulty of the repair but the cost of the repairs see the displays for these macbook pros even eight-year-old ones like this are astronomically catastrophically expensive a quick search on ebay if you want to find a nice one that matches the otherwise very very excellent condition of this macbook pro can easily be five or six hundred dollars that is insane you can buy this entire computer for about six hundred dollars and that's basically the cost of the display so if you think of it like this right imagine you have a car that's worth five thousand dollars and you end up blowing an engine and the engine replacement costs let's say forty five hundred dollars that is a car that would be considered mechanically totaled because the cost of repairing it is basically null and void when you could basically get another car for that amount of money that's basically what's going on with this macbook pro this would be uneconomical for me to repair because you know 250 is not a lot of money for one of these that's a crazy good deal if the display worked but if i wanted to buy a display to fix this computer i would be in it close to seven hundred dollars so obviously i'm not going to make a profit on that and this is a problem that's going to continue to get worse because as the newer macbook pros age they're going to quickly age into this problem anything with a retina display has this problem because the displays are so hard to find and they're also the most common thing to break so you've got this incredibly imbalanced system where there's very few displays and a lot of people who want to replace their displays and are like well it's stupid to buy a whole new computer and generate all of this waste of buying another computer when i could just repair the display on the one that i already have but if it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense now there is one potential angle where you could maybe make something like this work like let's say for example that you are the original owner of this macbook pro right you've bought this it's delaminated the screen is now ruined and you're you're trying to figure out what to do so 500 bucks is what you're looking at for a screen replacement or maybe 600 if you want to get a nice example of a similar computer like this that's a really tough pill to swallow you're talking about an eight-year-old macbook pro with just one little cosmetic issue and you're looking at five six hundred dollars to get yourself out of this problem well here's what i would recommend if you were in this situation the parts that make up a macbook such as this are generally more valuable than the completed macbook itself it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense when you think about it logically but when you look at a logic board for a computer like this those tend to run a little bit more than two hundred dollars a top case such as this in very good condition with a nice battery that still holds a charge you're looking at another maybe 130 dollars for that this computer has a 512 gigabyte ssd so you could probably get 70 bucks for that another 30 for the bottom case and weirdly enough you could still probably get 175 or 200 dollars for a display that's damaged like this that's 640 in parts for a non-functional macbook that i paid 240 dollars for ladies and gentlemen welcome to the absolutely insane world of used macbook pricing it doesn't make a single bit of sense you're talking about a computer that has a really messed up display that has 600 worth of parts in it on a computer that itself if it were fixed would only be 600 so it's absolutely insane to me that a broken macbook is worth the same if you part it out as a working macbook but that's the world we live in folks so if you're in a situation like this where your screen is somehow defective and you wanted to repair it don't spend 500 bucks on a display buy a new computer and then take your old one apart now that definitely seems like a life hack and i think it might actually be worth exploring for a full video experiment could we buy a working macbook take it apart and sell it and then make money without really having to do anything let me know in the comments below and of course subscribe if you want to see that video but setting that little life hack aside for a future video this is really sad because the vast majority of people aren't going to be like you and me who enjoy working on computers who want to extend the lifespan of their old 2009 macbook that's been sitting in the closet and you know you juice it up with an ssd and some extra ram and you got yourself a great secondary or primary device or you take a macbook like this and you repair it and you get a good deal and you feel good because you saved this from a landfill the vast majority of people aren't going to do that if you're the quote unquote average consumer and this happens to your macbook pro you're going to go to the apple store they're going to say well that's going to be 700 and you're either going to be absolutely robbed with an expensive repair like that or you're going to throw it away or if you're lucky you're going to sell it on ebay and then it gets to live on with someone like you and me but that doesn't happen that often a lot of these computers end up at recycling facilities that are sometimes going to part them out and save what usable components there are sometimes though they're just gonna get scrapped and that's a tremendous waste because even though this is an eight-year-old macbook pro and it's probably lived a pretty long life it doesn't need to be scrapped there are plenty of useful and recyclable and valuable components in here but with businesses and schools when stuff like this happens quite often they just get thrown away and that is an absolute tragedy it's sad to see computers like this go to waste when there's plenty of people that could really use them but well that's what happens when apple restricts the ability to repair and you end up with these supply constraints that make computers like this uneconomical to fix fortunately hopefully we've sort of found a little bit of a way around that in terms of buying these and then distributing the parts in a useful way contributing to the parts community by selling this for parts and in fact one way or another this computer's not gonna die i haven't quite figured out what i'm gonna do with this yet i mainly just bought it because i was like okay good condition with all the box and accessories for 240 bucks there must be something i can do with this computer so if you have an idea for what we could do with this let me know in the comments below this computer is not going to die under my watch so with that thank you guys for watching this video let me know what your take is on this whole dilemma with expensive macbook displays and of course don't forget to like comment and subscribe follow me on twitter lukemiani and don't forget to check out my subreddit which you'll find linked in the description below and with that i'll see you all in the next video so\n"