Electronic Equipment Amortization
TL;DR
How do you manage replacing or selling your electronic equipment?
I the past, I have always used my PC, phone printers etc until they have stopped working. At that point, I see if they can be repaired and whether the cost is worth it or not.
Recently, my PC started freezing a lot. It is about 8 years old and I thought that it was time to replace it. I didn't want to wait until it was completely dead this time because I use it a lot and the time between PC death and getting a replacement might be too long. I started looking at buying new parts to build a new one and somebody on Reddit suggested selling my old one. I didn't think anybody would buy something so old and freezing, but it seems that I could get between 200 and 250 for it depending on whether I include the monitor.
As it turned out, all I needed to do to get it working again was give it a really good clean and reapply the thermal paste to the CPU and cooler. It now runs almost perfectly (still sometimes freezes when transferring hundreds of gigabytes of data).
Now, I could keep it for another few years, and when it finally dies it's worth nothing. Selling it now would allow me to recoup some of my investment. I paid 600 Euros for it without the monitor, so 150 or 25% on something 8 years old seems really good to me.
When I started to think about buying the new parts, I realized that for a little less, I could get an Apple Macbook Air (base model) that according to the internet would suit my use case. At more or less the same time, I tried my girlfriend's iPhone 11 camera and was shocked at how good it was - good enough to replace my dedicated 4k camcorder. SO then I started thinking about replacing my mid-range phone with a new iPhone 13. It was at that point that I noticed that if you buy directly from Apple you can return an old iPhone and get a discount on the new one.
In Europe, we have a 3 year warranty of electrical items, so I am now thinking that after 3 maybe 4 years, I will upgrade to the latest phone and part exchange my old one. Apple products really seem to hold their value, so in some cases it may cost more initially, but the long term cost of ownership might be lower.
I am a YouTuber and in some ways, I need to see the MacBook and iPhone as a business expense and plan accordingly.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you manage your electrical equipment. Do you do as I did and keep using it until it dies or do you replace more often and recoup some of your investment. Do you sell privately? Do you plan ahead of time or just see how things go?
Thanks for reading this far.
April 26, 2022 at 05:54AM
