[beagle3]

When I was living in Israel, I was never able to find reasonably priced older 2nd hand x86s; there is no eBay culture, and somehow when companies have an upgrade cycle and retire a lot of old hardware, it is always to middle men who then ask for ridiculous prices (like 70% of price of new, faster, more efficient, cooler machine).

I wonder if that’s unique to Israel, or if the ease of getting reasonable 2nd hand hardware is unique to the US.

[ianburrell]

Big advantage of Raspberry Pi is that they are available everywhere for similar price. At least now that the shortage has ended. They have resellers all over the world which means can shop in local language.

My guess is that most of used PCs come from the US. A lot of companies have refresh cycles where buy new hardware every five years or so. There are a lot of support employees that get cheap mini PCs.

[beagle3]

Re: cheap pcs for support employees - that’s true everywhere; but it feels like only in the US is this 2nd hand market open to everyone.