[jvanderbot]

eBay remains the only reliable place to find good quality broken things, which is really important for reuse, repair of electronics.

It's also surprisingly good for niche items like a fan for a particular out of production CPU board.

A coworker once bought an old iMac to use to benchmark some satellite code because the old iMac and the RAD750 are pretty close (up to a factor 2 througout I guess). All eBay.

eBay is a national treasure.

[musictubes]

Indeed. It is possible to find particular vacuum tubes with specific construction on eBay as opposed to most dealers. Often times you spend more with eBay but at least you know what you are getting. eBay is the best place to find obscure items or even particular versions of obscure items.

[coffeebeqn]

As long as you buy from sellers with a decent history and non-fake reviews. And not but anything “too good to be true”. I bought a powerful mini PC for cheap from someone with hundreds of I guess fake reviews and got a keychain instead. They got fairly quickly banned and I got my money back

[faet]

I worked at a place that kept their legacy servers running through eBay parts.

The only reason they started migrating was because it started getting too expensive and hard to find old parts.

[lobsterthief]

You can also get a lot of open-box stuff (like smarthome items) for much cheaper than on Amazon