I’m sure a number of you have similar concerns, so here goes.
I have a number of Apple II (Rev 2 and 3), and II+ (Rev 4, 7, and RFI) computers, some even with original boxes. All work and have drives and multiple add-on cards. I’m planning for the future where these will have to go.
My concern is what do I do with these computers? There does not seem to be any demand. The marketplaces, Facebook, Craigslist, etc., do not show any for sale although an Apple IIe was previously listed for over 6 months. There is no computer museum or hobby groups that I can find.
Because I’m on the Pacific West Coast of Canada, shipping to the US is very expensive if I went the eBay route.
It would be a shame to just send them off for recycling but sooner rather than later I will have to do something.
Any ideas?
My suggestion would be to see if there are anyone local who are more generic collectors (Like I am) and see if they know any new collectors who would like a "cheap" Apple II in their collection.
(As an example, I was gifted an Apple IIeuroplus as my first Apple system. While I was fixing it, I accumulated a couple of clones and a IIe. Once I got it fixed I got a IIgs. I ended up selling it on to a fellow collector, pretty much for the price I'd paid for all the upgrades I'd stuffed into it. It's a gateway to further collecting)
Chesh
I'm really looking for a decent IIe/platinum/etc., but if you have a good rev7 II+ with stuff I could be convinced to make a nice home for it. DM me ... I'm trying to clean up a troublesome ancient PC laptop addiction and want to get back into some Apple II stuff.
People will pay the shipping on eBay if they want something bad enough. The market is soft right now for vintage computers but if you are patient and price things right they will sell eventually.
In my opinion the demand for Apple II machines is currently rising and will continue to rise until it reaches its peak around 2030 when the entire Generation X is in retirement. Then it will start to slowly fall and it will virtually disappear around 2050, when the last members of this generation start to go out of scope.
If it feels like it's low right now, this is simply the result of the drop after the COVID-19 local maximum and the huge increase of indoor activities that it caused temporarily.
For years the II+ has been cast to the side with collectors and hobbyists in favour of IIe, IIc, and IIGS.
But in the past year I have noticed quite an uptick in social media (and here) posts about II+ systems, many of them from newbie users, with newbie questions like: "What is this card with the funny connector leads in slot 3?" and "What's this card with the ribbon cable and why is there a missing RAM chip on the motherboard?"
In post #5, CVT wrote:
" In my opinion the demand for Apple II machines is currently rising and will continue to rise until it reaches its peak around 2030 when the entire Generation X is in retirement. "
Uncle Bernie comments:
Agree, but how many Gen X folks who were gaslighted into taking the depop jab will still be alive in 2030 ? And if they are alive, not spending all their wealth, or what's left of it, for treatment of their vaccine injuries ? --- This looks like it has been the plan all along: not a quick death, but just wreck the health of all these people enough so the perpetrators could then grab all their assets for the "treatments" they intend to sell to their victims. Pfizer CEO Bourla has promoted his $43 billion purchase of "Seagen" with claiming that he knows that cancer rates will explode in the near future, if you have a brain, guess how he can know that. (This is not a conspiracy theory, just search the web for "Pfizer Seagen" and look on Pfizer's own webpage).
With this "Elephant in the room" we can't predict the demand for Apple II computers (or any other collectibles) in the future.
What is worse, the heirs of those who die off prematurely will not bother to sell off the computer collections of the deceased, but just call in a company to empty the house and prep it for sale. This is where the money is. So my bet is that a lot of valuable, irreplaceable computer collections will go to landfills. Same with private (hobby) electronics labs and their instrumentation. What a waste !
Other than that, the insane and treasonous legislations passed by "lawmakers" bought and paid for by the nation wreckers will make it too burdensome and too expensive to ship anything to anywhere. It's already here. Just try to ship anything to the EU, Norway or Switzerland - even as a private person you have to follow their insane customs procedures and the smallest mistake will cause your parcel to be rejected. I had several such cases of sabotage by EU customs goons in the past year. Including one bad Signetics 2519 IC (declared as "defective, warranty return, value EUR 0.00") which was sent from the UK to Germany and was rejected by German customs with the sticker: "Not conforming to how the EU works". Literally ! Unbelievable ! The parcel went back to the UK and the desperate Apple-1 builder had to send the bad IC to the USA, which did cost more postage, and took much longer.
All this is not looking good, so if you want to get your valuable collections (not only Apple computers) into the right, worthy hands, do it now, and don't wait until the chaos get worse and the shipping gets totally unaffordable.
Just my 10 cents.
- Uncle Bernie
Almost all of them will be alive in 2030 – it’s only 6 year from now! Generation X is usually defined as people born from 1965 to 1980. The ones born in 1965 will be 65 in 2030. Actually my estimate might be off by 10 years - the peak should be in 2040, not 2030. In 2040 those who are born in 1965 will be 75, while those born in 1980 will be 60. Actually Generation X might live a lot longer than the Boomers, considering the better health care, less time being exposed to lead in the atmosphere thanks to unleaded gasoline, lack of nuclear tests in the atmosphere during their lifetime, and just the general trend of everything getting better and better as we move towards the future.
Now the assumption that Generation X is what drives the demand for Apple IIs is simply coming from my experience today with my ESP32 SoftCard customers. I have one Millennial, a couple of Boomers and perhaps a couple of Generation Ys. Everyone else is Generation X.
Interest in anything retro is primarily from Gen-X and younger Boomers. Millennials and younger have mosrly been conditioned to bekuve anything old is bad. Some may go away from that over time, because Gen-X wasn't always nostalgic about the 1970s and 1980s either, but probably not as many.
Uncle Bernie definitely has a point about shipping costs though. They've gotten stupidly high and look like they will get worse. As the powers that be are trying to completely ruin the entire transportaton industry, shipping will be impacted hard.
The II+ being immensly popular and almost totally repairable, along with a cheapISH (**queue a laugh-cry**) opportunity is what convinced me to look toward Apple 8bit devices after dealing with other platforms heavily utilising proprietary ICs. I'm looking for the immortal 8bit and I reckon the II+ could be it. I had almost zero exposure to this platform growing up. It was all Atari (VCS), C64, XT PC and occasional Amstrad until the 16bit'ers arrived. I know the IIe/c devices have more capability(and i'm currently working on having a daily driver IIe) but custom ICs and tighter integration mean the serviceability is a bit less despite the astounding work of hobbyists developing fixes, upgrades (and re-implementations) etc.
As for the original post. I have almost always ended paying more in shipping than the item itself, for anything computer sized, outside of my home country, Australia. If the items are honest and well-priced, the shipping cost becomes less painful, though that scale is being pushed hard by Company greed I think. I have occasionally worked with sellers to exclude / remove (if I think they are taking care for ESD) heavy or bulky components / items like power supplies if they are comfortable doing so as I usually have to use an alternate power supply here anyway. Not sure if that is a help. I do wish the shipping was inexpensive, I'd have budget to maybe help reduce your inventory at least by a little!
In post #10, "radventure" wrote:
".... is what convinced me to look toward Apple 8bit devices after dealing with other platforms heavily utilising proprietary ICs. I'm looking for the immortal 8bit and I reckon the II+ could be it. "
Uncle Bernie comments:
This issue with these proprietary ICs is exactly the reason why I "defected" from Atari 8 bit to the Apple II. The upside is that for the Atari 8-bit you can still buy all the custom ICs as "new old stock" from "Best Electronics" in California, but this is an operation owned by an old guy (AFAIK) and I don't know which plans he has for a successor. As for the 6502 itself, as long as Bill Mensch is around, there will be a source for 65SC02, but Bill, being one of the original NMOS 6502 designers, isn't young anymore either. For all the other families of computers using proprietary ICs the situation is hopeless. The only way to keep those up and running is to cannibalize others of the same type. I have a very broad 8-bit computer collection (and only a few 16-bit ones like Atari ST or Amiga) but all of them have the problem that once a "custom IC" in them dies, it's over, and you got a brick. You could show in a museum, though. Along will all the dead dinosaurs and the machines which will never move again.
Just a final note about CVT's opinion on post #8 that the fallout from the CV-19 vax won't be as bad as I claimed, the problem is that governments worldwide are swiping this biggest medical crime in human history under the rug. Vaccine injury / death databases like VAERS get scrubbed, excess death rate statistics disappear, recently, France has passed laws which criminalize any criticism of the "vax" - they will throw any journalist, blogger or investigator into prison if he exposes any aspect of this monstrous crime - and we must assume, based on what we have witnessed in the past four years, that everything the governments or the "experts" say in the matter is a lie. This applies to both sides of the aisle: the promoters say nothing bad has ever happened and the critics say there are worldwide more deaths from this vax already than deaths of civilians and military personnell in WW II. So the truth will never come out. But what I know for certain is that the industries worldwide already suffer from the effect of the sickended / dying workforce and portfolio planners / strategists are already working on products how you can invest your wealth to dodge the fallout from the vax carnage. Which I think is a futile exercise. Unless you can somehow invest such that you profit from the pharmaceutical/medical/industrial complex sucking away all the wealth from the victims. Which sure is a bonanza, you can get filthy rich with that, but I consider taking such blood money unethical.
- Uncle Bernie
Dude...
This is totally uncalled for. And not a welcome set of commentary in this forum.
I'm not sure I agree. Lots of custom chips have been reverse engineered. The Commodore SID chip, for instance has several modern replacements, and you yourself have gone about to create working versions of the IOU and MMU for the Apple IIe.
Where there is a demand there will be folks who will be enterprising and clever enough to recreate them.
The trick is demand...
I didn't realize right away what UncleBurnie was talking about when I posted my reply, since everything past the first sentence was TL;DR for me. But now I get it and I totally agree with you that this, in addition to the stuff he wrote in the second half of post #11 is complete nonsense and has no place in this forum.
One cannot always predict the degree of future demand or desire for an extremely important and popular product or piece of engineering.
To wit, from the late 1920's through the 30's:
When motion pictures transitioned from silent movies to those with recorded sound the Western Electric compnay (WE) was a leading audio reproduction pioneer, from the film projector and projector sound equipment to the theater speaker sound systems. These early sound technology items are highly sought after, highly valuable now, and since the late 1990's, a period that so far spans 60-100 years since their inception. I know this from direct experience for this period of 1997 to now.
(WE) was the audio reproduction gold standard, later replaced by Altec, RCA and others. It very well could be that the Apple II line falls into this same category 60 to 100 years from now. It all depends on how many examples of an early technology survive over time.
True, Apple II Rev 0's will always have a higher value than an Apple IIe due to sheer production quantity differences and therefore current availablility. But if enough people trash their IIe's over the next 40 years because they don't have market demand, their price will jump significantly.
I never would have thought my A2 Rev 0 would sell for as much as it did this past year...45 years ago.
I could pick them up.
Please don't send them to recycling. The so-called "marketplace" may not be what you think it is. Craigslist used to be the go to, and these days ebay seems to have more supply, and I have yet to see anything on amazon. There does not seem to be any way to see anything on the bigtech social media site without creating an account and logging in—hard pass. There are just too many crappified "marketplaces."
I think that there is demand just not a lot of cash or supply. I see overpriced clones, lids and labels, and broken equipment.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll keep exploring options.
I confirm that Ebay is the better marketplace to sell your items.
Plus, you might give Apple Rescue of Denver a consideration. https://applerescueofdenver.com/
After writing this I reread your first post and noticed you are in Canada. My bad.
In post #14, CVT wrote:
"... stuff he wrote in the second half of post #11 is complete nonsense and has no place in this forum ..."
Uncle Bernie comments:
I agree that the vax crime should not be given too much space in a technical forum about computers, and I had second thoughts about mentioning at all, but still, the topic of "Gen X" producing increasing demand for Apple II computers after they retire in Y2030-2040 came up, and I wondered how dead and disabled / chronicall ill people could ever produce such a demand.
The topic is real and not "complete nonsense". I saw enough vax deaths and disabilites on my circle of friends and family. But I won't post on the topic anymore, I promise. For anyone still interested in looking in the topic, here is a recent link as a starter:
https://vigilantnews.com/post/tucker-carlson-poses-an-unexpected-covid-vaccine-question/
Note that this crime is also under investigation by a panel of the U.S. Senate, under Senator Ron Johnson. And U.S. Senators do not waste their time and effort on "complete nonsense". Time will tell how long the perpetrators can suppress the truth. And then all hell will break loose.
And this is my last comment on this nasty topic here on applefritter.
- Uncle Bernie
Complete coo-coo stuff like this should not be given ANY space in a technical forum about computers. Of course everyone is free to believe even that the Earth is flat, but this is not the place for it.
Yikes...
Tucker Carlson is either a complete ignoramus (he certainly comes across as such quite often) or he's an expert at manipulating the fears of the alt-right (which he also seems to be good at).
Methinks a little of both.
I'm still looking for a standard II so there is interest, but have heard the same about shipping from BC to eastern US... crazy UPS border surcharges and all the extra inflation increases. Kinda nuts. I should say next trip to Vancouver would be worth a chat to see if there's anything you are intersted in parting with at that time. =)
Gen X here and I would love to get a hold of one. I grew up on Apple and I currently feed my nostalgia with emulators and old games. I would love to buy one of those off you. I'm in the states so I can't imagine shipping would be too outrageous.
An Applefritter member picked up my surplus Apple IIs last week.
Thanks for all your suggestions.
Glad to hear they went to a good home.