How to get a great offer on a used computer.

Planning to upgrade your laptop? Then, you’ve come to the right place. Your old computer may still be worth something, and if it is not too old and well cared for, you might be able to get a good trade-in value on it. Luckily, when it comes to reselling used tech, possibilities are nearly endless. You can list your older laptop on eBay or Craigslist; you can trade it in at a retail store or pick an online buyback platform like ours, Gadget Salvation. 

However, one must take certain preparation steps to get a good offer on their preowned tech. Please keep reading to learn what those are. 

Important!

When shopping around for trade-in value on a used laptop, be sure to factory reset it at some point. But before you perform a restore, please back up your old computer first. Both an external hard drive and cloud storage is excellent for that. We wrote at length about how to factory reset an Apple laptop and factory reset a Dell laptop in the past. The latter will come in handy for anyone who owns a Windows-based computer.

Laptop Trade-in Value

When shopping around for offers on any used electronic device, the owner must consider a number of factors that determine a resale value. For example, the year make and depreciation. Then there is the brand, the specific model number, overall cosmetic and functional condition, etc.

Depreciation

Every single gadget goes through a usage cycle while losing value over time. And the depreciation rate for technology, such as computers, tablets, and smartphones, is significantly higher than for other assets, such as automobiles. For instance, an average cellphone devalues about 75% the first year after purchase. And as a result, tech companies strive to release newer, better, faster gadget models to keep up with demand and replace outdated software and hardware more and more frequently.

In turn, this creates a problem of utilizing previous, still perfectly working laptop, tablet, and smartphone versions. And some outdated models, like most Apple products, are still in high demand on a second-hand market. Thus, a resale tech market was born, or, as we like to call it, re-commerce.

Indeed, you can make money out of your unwanted tech, and we’d like to give you a few practical illustrations: 

• For example, an older used HP Spectre x360 15 with Intel Core i7 8th generation processor still gets you up to a $307 cash offer.* Not bad at all, considering high depreciation rates for laptops. 
• An Apple MacBook Air 13-inch 2019 Intel Core i5 1.6GHz with 512GB storage used laptop has up to $380 trade-in value.*
• A gaming laptop, Alienware M15 R5 with an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 graphics can be resold for about $881 fully working.*

As you can see, some laptop brands and models keep better trade-in value over time than others. For example, used gaming laptops are always in high demand. And so are Apple computers. So if you are a frequent upgrader, we suggest trading in your older models right the way because every month (or even week!) you wait, you potentially lose money. 

Best Places for Online Laptop Trade-ins

As we mentioned above, there are several ways to resell a used computer. Some are more streamlined, while others may yield a higher cash return. But it is always wise to start with shopping around for offers. And once you have picked a few good options for reselling your used laptop, it would make sense to look at the selling process as a whole. For example, do you want to receive cashback, or are you interested in getting a store credit to upgrade? Are you willing to spend some time and effort to sell your preowned computer, or do you want to get rid of it quickly? 

We recommend looking for options that strike a good balance between convenience vs. a cashback value. Think online laptop trade-in platforms. Those would provide instant valuations, take care of shipping costs, and usually are quicker than a more traditional eBay route. An online re-commerce platform for trading in used laptops for value has proven to be more efficient nowadays. 

In Conclusion

Before choosing a used laptop trade-in service, please take necessary precautions to, if not increase, secure your offer. These include factory reset, cleaning your computer, etc. Also, get a few estimates to compare. Lastly, figure out whether you are willing to do the work and wait until the laptop sells on eBay, or you’d trade it in for cash in an easy way with Gadget Salvation instead!

*Priced on 03/17/2022. Subject to change.