Like any self-respecting gadget hound, I found myself at an impasse: I have an iPad first gen but I want an iPad 2 . I also have limited funds and a family to feed. So, then, do I keep both iPads and sell the family or perform the opposite of that transaction and sell the iPad 1st gen,b keep the family, and buy the iPad 2. After an evening of careful concentration on soul searching, I’ve decided to keep the kids. For now.
So, then, what to do? Knowing that there were a full complement of sites available that would, ostensibly, buy your old gear at a fair price, I began my hunt. I found a number of “gadget recycling” sites and typed in my particulars – a 64GB iPad First Gen Wi-Fi in excellent condition, factory fresh iOS. As a baseline I checked out eBay and Craigslist where I found an iPad 64GB that worked “perfect” in Midtown Manhattan:
And a 64GB model closing at about $460 after fierce bidding.
Both of these prices are, at best, frothy but let’s assume that my iPad 64GB could sell for about $430 on a good day and I’d be fine with that. However, with Craigslist and eBay you’re obviously dealing with the creep factor. Ebay, at least in my recent experience, has been a mess. Everything I sold there recently had a buyer drop out or contact me in broken English asking me to send the iPad to his cousin in Nigeria who ran a home for blind, homeless kittens and that I would receive the price of the item plus a check for $500 I’m to deposit and then mail to a cousin in Canada. Therefore, this was a sub par solution.
But what else is there? I began with the service I was most familiar with, Gazelle.com. Like most of these services, Gazelle pays for shipping and allows you to state the perceived condition of the item. They will even take junk items so if you dropped your iPad, they’d still take it in, strip it down, and use its component parts.
Gazelle, bless their heart, came back with $304 and, if you know me, I don’t get out of bed for less than $305.
I then hit EcoSquid.com, a site still in beta, and it couldn’t even find the iPad. Instead, it recommended I sell a Sharp cellphone.
Next up was YouRenew. These guys would pay $345, a bit less than I’d like but a bit more than Gazelle.
Then, in checking eBay one more time, I discovered something called eBay Instant Sale offering me up to $450 for my iPad. What a treat! A great price with no human-to-human interaction. Sadly, 450 eBay Dollars = 355 American Dollars in the final reckoning.
Our last contender, BuyMyTronics offered $364 – a bit closer to my Quixotic $430 but still far from the mark.
The winner? No one site, really. Ebay is rife with scammers, Craigslist may require me to go to midtown, and the best price I could get from the robots is $364. However, I may just press my luck and hang on eBay a bit longer and, barring that, ship it up and send it over to BuyMyTronics in the last resort. Or, if all else fails, I’d be willing to take fair offers on my family, barely used, with all cables and a case.