I almost had complete, working Plus with a printer as a swap for my DualUSB but the two hour drive killed that deal, and I once almost had two G4 towers for $10 each.
I think generally people overprice Macs because they think they can fool less intelligent people into thinking a ten year old machine is a supercomputer, in fact that's sort of kind of not really what happened when I bought my first, the DualUSB G3. People spend their entire lives on Windows and then they get curious... "What's this whole Mac thing like?" they say to themselves, "I bet it's completely different!" they say, "such a large, vocal fanbase can't be wrong!"! Then they drop their entire summer paycheck on a PowerPC machine with a dead battery and while certainly disappointed, are addicted from that point on.
As for the older ones, a lot of it is probably a big, smelly, putrid snowball of greed compounded with ignorance. Guy A puts a machine up for an obviously exorbitant price, guy B sees guy A's ad and thinks "Wow, I can get THAT much!?" and then guy C, maybe with no harmful intention, goes on eBay to check prices... And the cycle repeats.
But yeah, you can find reasonably priced Macs, you just have to scour yard sales and pawn shops or be willing to pay shipping. It's kind of like this in game collecting too, all these "ULTRA R@RE!!1!" titles you see going for $200-$300 can be scored for a far more reasonable price with a little patience and a lot of travelling.
I think generally people overprice Macs because they think they can fool less intelligent people into thinking a ten year old machine is a supercomputer, in fact that's sort of kind of not really what happened when I bought my first, the DualUSB G3. People spend their entire lives on Windows and then they get curious... "What's this whole Mac thing like?" they say to themselves, "I bet it's completely different!" they say, "such a large, vocal fanbase can't be wrong!"! Then they drop their entire summer paycheck on a PowerPC machine with a dead battery and while certainly disappointed, are addicted from that point on.
As for the older ones, a lot of it is probably a big, smelly, putrid snowball of greed compounded with ignorance. Guy A puts a machine up for an obviously exorbitant price, guy B sees guy A's ad and thinks "Wow, I can get THAT much!?" and then guy C, maybe with no harmful intention, goes on eBay to check prices... And the cycle repeats.
But yeah, you can find reasonably priced Macs, you just have to scour yard sales and pawn shops or be willing to pay shipping. It's kind of like this in game collecting too, all these "ULTRA R@RE!!1!" titles you see going for $200-$300 can be scored for a far more reasonable price with a little patience and a lot of travelling.