Flipping Broken eBay Laptops for Profit (Did I Make Money?)
Joe C-J
11,430 views
I wanted a new camera… but they’re not cheap.
So instead of saving like a responsible adult, I decided to try something slightly questionable. Buying “spares and repairs” laptops from eBay, fixing them, and seeing if I could sell them for more than I paid.
The plan was simple:
Buy broken laptops
Fix them
Trade them into CeX
Turn the credit into a camera
Of course, it didn’t exactly go smoothly.
There were disasters, BIOS-locked ThinkPads, dead batteries, logic board swaps, and several moments where I questioned what I was doing with my life.
Eventually I realized something interesting:
the 2015 MacBook Air is the perfect laptop for repairs. Cheap to buy, cheap parts, and (usually) easy to fix.
After repairing several of them, it was time to head to CeX and find out if this experiment had actually worked.
The results i was pretty pleased with. Not enough to buy the camera outright… but definitely enough to take the sting out of it.
_______________________________________
Chapters
0:00 The plan
0:58 Macbook Pro Disaster
1:53 ThinkPads
3:39 Plan Adjustment
3:51 Macbook Airs
6:08 Side Quest
7:13 Recap
7:51 Cex
20 Comments
Flipping Broken eBay Laptops for Profit (Did I Make Money?)
Joe C-J
11,430 views
I wanted a new camera… but they’re not cheap.
So instead of saving like a responsible adult, I decided to try something slightly questionable. Buying “spares and repairs” laptops from eBay, fixing them, and seeing if I could sell them for more than I paid.
The plan was simple:
Buy broken laptops
Fix them
Trade them into CeX
Turn the credit into a camera
Of course, it didn’t exactly go smoothly.
There were disasters, BIOS-locked ThinkPads, dead batteries, logic board swaps, and several moments where I questioned what I was doing with my life.
Eventually I realized something interesting:
the 2015 MacBook Air is the perfect laptop for repairs. Cheap to buy, cheap parts, and (usually) easy to fix.
After repairing several of them, it was time to head to CeX and find out if this experiment had actually worked.
The results i was pretty pleased with. Not enough to buy the camera outright… but definitely enough to take the sting out of it.
_______________________________________
Chapters
0:00 The plan
0:58 Macbook Pro Disaster
1:53 ThinkPads
3:39 Plan Adjustment
3:51 Macbook Airs
6:08 Side Quest
7:13 Recap
7:51 Cex
As a PC technician in my previous life I avoided PC laptops because it is very time consuming and cost more to support multiple laptop manufacturers so it was better to focus on Apple Macbooks. I brought like a dozen parts/repair Macbooks to learn for pretty cheap.
The most profitable ones I found were the 2008 to 2012 Macbook Pros because they are easily repairable and upgradable. The later models are harder to upgrade ram/storage and have the adhesive batteries which are a pain. The Airs have limited memory that you can't upgrade.
Sold all the macbooks and made some play money. It was a fun learning experience that was worth the small amount of money spent. Wish you great success.