Hold onto your Macs - They'll Be Worth Something (one day)


Grab that dusty Lisa or Mac 128 and put it on ebay - because you could make yourself a small fortune.

A Reuters report at Macon Area Online looks at the strong bidding for vintage computers in recent years. The Woz-Jobs Apple Is, of which there were only 200, fetch between $14,000 and $25,000.

Old stuff is popular: think Tandy laptops; Kaypro desktops but, oddly, no mention of Altairs.

Microsoft CYO Nathan Myhrvold obviously has more money than sense; he bought a relay rack which belonged to a Second World War ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), a huge mainframe, of which only bits and pieces remain.

We wonder what his wife said when he brought that home (when you consider how many shoes you can buy for $70,000).

But common-as-muck PCs don't fetch much. So don't expect your PowerBook 100 to get big bids (at least not until 2020). Original IBM PCs, while they do get sold, attract only $20-$50 bids.

Apple/Macintosh models are among the most popular, however. We've heard in Japan that small second-hand shops devote entire sections of their shelves to old Macs - Japan is a land where the Color Classic and Color Classic II still fetch healthy prices, for example.

We'd bet that the odd Outbound [a Mac OS PowerBook clone with some interesting features, such as a detachable screen] fetches a reasonable sum, due primarily to its rarity. Mac Portables, far from popular in their lifetime, are eagerly sought after by PowerBook/Mac afficionados.

Cubes, too, probably have the best depreciation (or return on investment, depends on your perspective) of any G4 model - or any recent Mac, for that matter. Given their short production run and less-than-impressive sales, we'd wager by 2010 they'd fetch a pretty penny.

And if they don't, at least the Cube's a helluva lot easier to turn into a Macquarium.