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by vacri 4674 days ago
he chose to spend 4 full working days to build a computer

Interesting that you count build time against his billable hours, but not resale time for the canned system. Selling something does not take a negligible amount of time or effort.

1 comments

I sell a Mac about every year. It takes me under 5 hours of work. That includes formatting the drive and reinstalling OS X, placing the ad, negotiating with buyers, and having them visit to inspect it and seal the deal.

It isn’t skilled work and it’s not taking time away from my actual work. It’s hard to put a price sticker on, just like I don’t calculate how much money I waste by going to a movie.

There is another reason why I didn’t mention the time it takes for resale. From reading the article I got the impression that OP didn’t count the time it took to research the various components of his Hackintosh, the time it took to look them up and order them, and dealing with the delivery. I think those activities easily take longer than reselling a recent Mac.

Interesting that you say selling things isn't skilled work - when you need to know how to get payments, where to list, how best to list, how to deal with purchasers, what the best way to take payment is, figuring out shipping and packaging. These things are skills, and once you know them, sure, it's easy... but you still had to learn those skills.

While I think it's less time overall to resell than build, for sure, I also think you're stacking the deck by handwaving away the time and skills involved in reselling.