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Tech on the Cheap?
andyatkinson asks: "A technology enthusiast always has more products and services to buy than he or she can possibly afford. A variety of methods will help you save money: discount, deal, and coupon websites, price comparisons, eBay, and rebates. How do you save bucks on tech?"
Bring on the free software people.
adventure-today.com
Because you can always get more for less if you wait 6 months.
6 months from now, repeat.
Oh wait, that's not me that I'm thinking of.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
The latest and greatest is seldom so great. Now is a great time to buy a GameCube or PS2 if you don't have one. All the good games have been made and are available for bargain basement rates. Also, at my home we have several old Macs that we use for the wife & kids. We find them more than adequate for our purposes. I guess it all comes down to learning to be content with getting things later rather than sooner.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"In one 9 month period, I bought and sold 5 laptops, taking a loss of around $200-300 per sale, before settling on one to keep. This is a bit extreme and certainly involved a fair amount of hassle, but on the plus side, I was able to try out several brand new laptops on my own terms, and sell them for a relatively minimal loss. After about 9 months, I still had a new laptop for around US $1500 (as opposed to leasing laptops)."
Given the conservative estimate of $200 loss per purchase, that would $1000. That would mean that at the end he either had a $1500 laptop for $2500, or else he bought a $500 laptop for $1500. Either way this is not "Tech on the Cheap."
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Don't buy into a new technology for the first couple of years unless it is immediately apparent the item will repay your money over a 1-year time frame. Generally it takes 3 years for the rapid advancement period to come to a conclusion and product lines to stabilize. You will also avoid a lot of fads this way.
Avoid any proprietary formats - MD Disc, Blu-Ray, DVD-Audio. These never work out in the long run.
A technology enthusiast always has more products and services to buy than he or she can possibly afford
I don't have this problem. I'm not rich either. Is "tech enthusiast" some new code word for "sucker consumer"?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Rule number one: Never buy the "top-of-the-line" product. Always purchase one or two notches below it. There's usually a major price point between the fastest CPU and those below it and the difference in performance is marginal.
If you're shopping for laptops, check the chain stores like CompUSA and others. Sometimes they have special versions of manufacturer's products that are better-equipped than more widely-available items at greater cost.
EBay is definitely invaluable. Like others have said, if a new generation product comes out, like a RAID array or new server technology, you can often pick up the previous generation's products at a fraction of the cost. When Compaq discontinued one line of high performance servers, the market became flooded with these units for pennies-on-the-dollar.
For other kinds of tech, like cell phones, look into the pre-paid plans as an alternative to the standard monthly contracts. It is true, you may not find the Treo 650 on a discounted prepaid plan like you would if you committed to a two-year contract, but you can often get great phones at the same price people pay who commit to multi-year contracts when you sign up for the pay-as-you-go plans. This is a great deal that is geared normally for kids or people with bad credit, but ends up being a better deal for others who want to avoid getting locked into a particular calling plan that costs them more money later.
There's no need to stay cutting edge unless you're really into the latest games or you feel a need to keep ahead of everyone else. I was that way once, but a period of extended unemployment caused me to reevaluate that attitude. :-)
I've actually been very happy using older PCs at home for years. Not only do I purchase most of my PCs and related peripherals on eBay, but I have a whole series of other sites I hit on a regular basis for various techie supplies and misc items (www.ubid.com, www.compgeeks.com, www.cyberguys.com, www.pcsurplusonline.com, etc.).
My Palm PDAs are all older (two Palm m105's, one IIIc) with the exception of my Fossil/Abacus WristPDA (which at US$49 on eBay was the least expensive of the lot). My digital camera is still a refurb Casio QV3000EX I picked up on uBid five years ago for half its retail price. The last piece of hardware I purchased was a new 16-port 10BaseT/100BaseTX auto-sensing switch for US$22 at CompGeeks. It seems to work fine. The second-to-last one was a refurb 8-port Belkin OmniView Pro KVM (F1D108-OSD-B) which I absolutely love. Cost: US$70 including 8 new 10-foot cables from a nice guy on eBay.
If you do the research, learn what what you actually need instead of what you want, and spend a little bit of time looking around, you can find a lot of good stuff for very little money.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I've been in the refurb business and have some experience with these surplus sales. There's a couple reasons why you don't hear about them.
One, most of this surplus sales are auctions meant for volume buyers. They don't advertise them in consumer channels because they don't want to sell 1 computer to an individual, they want to sell 2000 computers to a guy with forklift and a truck that will haul them away. When companies/schools decommission large amounts of technology, they want to get them out of the way as quickly as possible. Being able to sell some of it to recoup their losses on the way to the dumpster is just a small bonus to them. They're not in the business of opening a flea market to the public.
Two, a lot of the auctioneers and the big buyers play "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" games. Pretty much to hear about the good auctions you get the information directly from the auctioneer that was hired to conduct the sale. To do that you need to be on their list to begin with, and it helps if you've been a good customer to them for a while (i.e., pay for your lots on time and get them off-site quick). Of course this creates a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario, so if you want to do this for a living it helps to make some contacts up front with other buyers and find out from them where to go. Depending on the area, once you get in good with two or three of the biggest auction houses you'll get info on most of the auctions in the area.
Auctioneers are mostly regional (there are a few national clearing houses but prices tend to be high because of the visibility), but if you're local to Texas here's a couple I suggest (that actually have web sites, a lot of them don't):
Rene Bates Auctioneers, Inc.
Lemons Auctioneers