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Just started getting more and more of these........Most are not even bringing $25-$30 refurbished online......I know Ipad/Samsung etc has more value.........One little board in the back?.......Worthless?......Haven't seen any buyers for these..........Right now its not an issue just a few here and there but more lately than before.....Any opinions or does anyone care?
It seems to be a sign of the times. The consumer trend has been from larger to smaller. With each step there's less and less value that can be recovered. From what i'm seeing there aren't nearly as many towers or laptops entering the e-waste stream. It's only a fraction of what it was last year.
The "bubble back" tv's have dropped off significantly over the last few months. There are more flat screen tv's coming in. ( They don't seem to have a long service life.)
Once in awhile you see a tablet or similar small device but it's pretty slim pickin's there.
Just an opinion, but it seems like the handwriting is on the wall.The manufacturers have done a really good job of finding ways to do more with less and increase their profitability. It would seem to make sense that there's progressively less and less to recover from the waste stream as time wears on.
Maybe it's like the old shoe maker. Back in the 50's and 60's there was a craftsman that repaired shoes. Most larger communities had at least one shoe repair shop. The times changed in the 70's. Production shifted to the East and shoes were made so cheaply that you just tossed them away and bought a new pair when they wore out. The old fashioned cobbler was no more.
It sucks to be the cobbler but sometimes that's just the way of things. The trick would be to shift and adapt to a change in the environment to avoid becoming obsolete. There's not much money to be made in recycling or refurbishing old shoes.
I get a few here and there too. The buyer I use takes them with the complete laptops, for the same price per lb.
I have a had a little bit of success selling a small pile of them for parts or repair. Beats scrap price by about 4 fold or better depending on the stack and the condition. I have a very small stack once again, but too small to list on e-bay.
I did recently get a nice Apple Ipad. Older version, but works great. I use it occasionally, and has a resale value of about $50 if I decide to part with it. When I got it, I did a factory reset and then downloaded video files until it was full and then erased them. That satisfied the needs of my client for over-writing all of the data on it.
I make a fair amount of money selling some phones and tablets as parts...but yes, the really cheap tablets are worthless to repair. I would be interested in what they are going for...it SEEMS like it would be same as cell phone since it would have wifi and other things in it that are high quality...granted not the quality in SOME cell phones. But if I can get $3/lb on the $30 go phones, then the boards would be at least that good.
Of course, the buyers set pricing, so we shall see where it falls.
It's a hard call on the M.2's. Some are removable and others are embedded in the board like with a cell phone. Easiest way is to pull them and run a three pass overwrite just like you would any HDD. They're incredibly fast so it doesn't take very long.
The question will be if it's wise to re-use them like a HDD. Right now ... i would say no because they only have a limited number of read/write cycles before they're worn out. It might be better to install new if you're doing a refurb.
The SSD's, in all their different forms, are newer technology so they're expensive.That's especially so with the larger capacity data storage devices. It's like anything else though,the price will drop a lot when that technology becomes the standard thing they use in all devices.