Skyscraper wrote:

SiliconClassics wrote:

In 2008 I paid $1,250 for a mint in box PowerBook G4 17" purely as a collectible. I knew it would lose value, but if I waited another five years for prices to hit bottom the chances of finding one complete in the box would be zero. It's probably only worth about $500 today but in another ten years it will be a rare find and potentially worth much more, though I'll probably hold onto it - it's a beautiful design. I probably booted it once or twice and it's been on a shelf ever since.

You need to charge the battey once every 10 years or so or it will be hard to charge agan, at least with the laptop. I would do it every 5 years or perhaps even every other year just to be sure (I'm assuming they are Lithium cells).

Don't charge the battery to 100% but to ~80% and keep the battery outside the computer if it's removable then the battery should be as good as new even in 20 years time. 😀

I'm not sure this works with PowerBook G4 batteries, mine suddenly died after losing about 40% of its maximum charge over the years, and I almost never used the laptop on the battery.

Luckily, PowerBooks will happily work on the power supply with a dead or no battery installed.

Anyway, if PowerBooks are now vintage, mine cost me 2500 Euros new back in 2005 (and it still works; it lives under my desk... 🤣 ).

yawetaG wrote:

I'm not sure this works with PowerBook G4 batteries, mine suddenly died after losing about 40% of its maximum charge over the ye […]
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Skyscraper wrote:

SiliconClassics wrote:

In 2008 I paid $1,250 for a mint in box PowerBook G4 17" purely as a collectible. I knew it would lose value, but if I waited another five years for prices to hit bottom the chances of finding one complete in the box would be zero. It's probably only worth about $500 today but in another ten years it will be a rare find and potentially worth much more, though I'll probably hold onto it - it's a beautiful design. I probably booted it once or twice and it's been on a shelf ever since.

You need to charge the battey once every 10 years or so or it will be hard to charge agan, at least with the laptop. I would do it every 5 years or perhaps even every other year just to be sure (I'm assuming they are Lithium cells).

Don't charge the battery to 100% but to ~80% and keep the battery outside the computer if it's removable then the battery should be as good as new even in 20 years time. 😀

I'm not sure this works with PowerBook G4 batteries, mine suddenly died after losing about 40% of its maximum charge over the years, and I almost never used the laptop on the battery.

Luckily, PowerBooks will happily work on the power supply with a dead or no battery installed.

Anyway, if PowerBooks are now vintage, mine cost me 2500 Euros new back in 2005 (and it still works; it lives under my desk... 🤣 ).

Quite a few G4 era Powerbooks will not boot with a dead PRAM battery, remove it and all is well.

I know from years is best just to wait, and the proper hardware will come to me, no need to pay excessive amounts of money to get them..
Patience is the thing i need, and then i get good stuff for about no money...

Or, the prices will skyrocket with diminishing supply and then you get so old that it's impossible to use anything with those trembling hands and you can only surf the web with voice commands. 😈

I spent over $200 on Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs at the end of 2015 when their Japanese plant was about to shut down. Technically the brand still exists, but it was sold off to one of their foreign competitors.
I decided I wanted to lock in a supply of discs that I knew would work with sensitive drives from the 1990s. This was mainly for devices where the drive can't feasibly be swapped for something newer. There was some reasoning behind it but it also felt a bit frivolous. I may come to be grateful that I did it, or I might not.

As far as actual PC components (retro, not current tech).. I can't really think of a single item I paid a huge amount of money for. However, I sometimes get into mini spending sprees where the total starts to add up.
There are some items I've owned for a long time which have become quite expensive, so in a sense, I'm "spending" a lot of money by keeping them instead of selling them.