Re: Apple IIes decreasing on eBay?

[Charlie Springer <RAM@regnirps.com>]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 04:08:09 -0700, schmidtd wrote
(in article 
<7fd4f73d-0846-4ed5-a8dd-3569c4de9661@z38g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>):

>> I am seeing fewer and fewer Apple //e systems on eBay and also get the
>> impression that people are paying less. Anybody concur?
>> 
>> I have a dozen e's and a dozen or more gs's of various pedigrees (and a
>> bunch of IIci's, my favorite Mac) and was thinking of selling a few and
>> keeping a few for my ever so slow project of an ARM 65C02 emulator for the
>> Apple //e.
> eBay isn't so much a bellwether of the "market," as it is an instant
> snapshot of supply vs. demand on a single given day.  Common Apple
> stuff sometimes goes for wildly inflated prices, and sometimes stuff
> goes for chump change.  There's not enough volume on either side to
> really establish any standard values.  A few things seem to always do
> well - SCSI cards and accelerators, for example.  But it seems to have
> most to do with who happens to be looking for what, when, and how
> impatient they happen to be.

Mostly it seems that the volume is way down from half a dozen pages to about 
two, and they are half or more software and someone selling games in red 
boxes. (I wonder if the Battle Zone and Stargate are any good?) The number of 
cpu's and systems is pitiful. I track the auctions of Apple II stuff and Quad 
G5 PowerMacs. (There is a version of mathematica built to multi-thread on the 
Quad G5.)

Off topic, lately I have been wishin Apple had stuck it out with IBM. The 
Cell processor in the new blades and in the PS3 is a 3.2 GHz G5 with Altivec 
and 8 parallel computation engines. Some places are using sets of 8 PS3's as 
a modern supercomputer. Four or eight in a PowerMac box would be pretty 
sweet.

-- Charlie Springer