I've had quite good luck with CL in the past, and FB Marketplace more recently. I feel much better being able to physically see the device before I pay for it.

That way you can verify that It's been properly reset, and that the description/picture are accurate.

If you don't want to do eBay and you're near a Micro Center, they often have some really old refurbished stuff in stock. Got myself a 2014 Mac mini for $250.

:)

I think it depends on the Micro Center. I've been going to the one in Parkville since it opened, and will keep doing until either it dies or I do. Back in 2015 I got a really nice refurbed 2014 MBP that I still use daily, but a couple years later they dropped a lot of old stock in their Apple section and there's been next to nothing in there ever since - latest models of hardware, a few matching accessories, and that's more or less all there is to it.

I haven't asked about that that I can recall, but my guess is they don't see a lot of margin on that stuff, especially with at least two Apple stores in easy driving distance and most Apple customers tending strongly to favor the latest and greatest. Disappointing, but with the streaming boom then being on the upswing, I really can't blame them for making space to cater to the open-walleted parents of a million infants in Fortnite t-shirts.

Still, if you have a Micro Center nearby and you haven't been, you should go there. It's like what computer stores used to be, back when those still existed.

I did this once, bought an older MacBook Pro to make sure my app was still 'usable' on an older machine. And then after about a year the machine didn't get updates any more, and then a year after that it just died. Wasted my $300.

I have a 2006 Intel MacBook that still works but I've also had 3 year old Macs just quit working.

In some ways $150/yr to make sure your app was usable may be a worthwhile expenditure.

And if you abuse things like https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases you can keep running "modern" releases on older hardware.

But it depends on what you're trying to do.

Perhaps the devices are worth fixing. I trust Rossmann Repair because of their YouTube videos.

Depending on how it dies, it's often not worth repairing a $300 laptop - since you can buy another one for $300.

It is often worth selling the dead one for parts to someone else; even if the logic board is dead the screen is likely to be useful.

You bought a used machine, and got 2 years of testing out of it for $300? You got a pretty good deal.

I've also had 3 year old Dells, HPs, Lenovos, ASUS, you name it... all die prematurely. I don't honestly believe that any particular company uses any better quality hardware than another. Not measurably better, at least. You're just gonna win some, and lose some, no matter how much you pay for the hardware. This year's most reliable laptop could have a revision next year that makes it the worst laptop...

With laptops and proprietary desktops especially, it's sometimes worth paying for the extra warranty.

Sorry, did you say "this computer that only cost me $150 a year but allowed me to test and deploy for its platform on native hardware was a waste of money"? Because it kinda sounds like the completely opposite?

As a counter anecdote, I've done this three times for macs so far, and all of those still work for their intended purpose. The 2011 model even survived overheating due to user error and fried its internal graphics cables but works fine with an external monitor. And sure, they're all stuck on whatever their respective latest operating systems are, but that's fine: they're test/compile machines, not daily drivers. And not all of them: in 2022 the oldest realistic mac target you're looking at is the 2015 macbook pro (i.e. "the good one", that even today's models can still take design lessons from).

And here's the best part: if something in them breaks, replacing the entire machine is only a few hundred bucks. Which you don't have to: you just need to buy a "for parts" with the bits you need still working. Any model that's still being used in the wild still has a decent sized for parts market. You can tell when the world stops using a model when the parts dry up.