Mac Mini: Throwing a Monkeywrench into the Used Mac Market

I periodically find myself browsing through the listings at http://www.usedmac.ca/ and ebay for good deals on used Macintoshes. But ever since Apple released the Mac Mini, I've noticed that what I previously might have considered reasonable now seems like a really bad deal. Just a month ago I would have thought that $800 for a 1GHz Power Mac G4 tower was a reasonably good deal.

But Apple has now set a new baseline for comparison. Now you know for sure that if you can't get better than a 1.25 GHz G4 machine for $650 CDN, you might as well just buy a new machine.

It's always been the case that used Macs have a much higher resale value than PCs do, partly because you previously couldn't find new ones for <$1000, and partly because they are well-built machines that last for ages. I'm still getting everything I need out of a development machine in an old G4 450MHz tower that's just had a RAM upgrade and nothing else.

I wonder if part of why Apple's 'market share' numbers are so low, much lower than the percentage of people I know who own an Apple computer, is that people keep their machines around longer and many people buy them used. The thing every computer magazine columnist has mused about is how the Mini will affect Apple's market share. But I wonder if they, or Apple, have considered the untapped market of people hanging on to older hardware who can now get an excellent deal on a new machine.

At any rate, Apple and Dell remain the only profitable major computer makers, so the dime-a-dozen columnists who criticize Apple over things like market share, which are based on fudged numbers to begin with, really don't have much to complain about these days.

As a side-note, searching for pictures with the 'macmini' tag on Flickr yielded much better results than Google's image search. The semantic web is sneaking up on us, it seems.
Technorati Tags: Apple, MacMini