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What do you do with old electronics?
I'm making an effort to declutter and trying to get rid of my old electronics. I have a bunch of old Oculus hardware, my old gaming PC with a Ryzen and a RX480, an old Xbox console and other things around the house. Do you recommend going through eBay, or Swappa or another specialty website, or if there may be a hobby shop willing to take things off of hands, or just go to Goodwill and accept the resale value as sunk cost?
Are you trying to maximize profit from said devices, or just gain a service fee for shipping them out? Would you consider donating them?
No wrong answers, just curious.
Exploring options more than anything. Local donation or pricing out eBay stuff is on the table.
Usually I sell it, give it away or recycle it. Preferably in that order.
I've taken a bunch of old tech to Best Buy since they have an electronics recycling program. For anything else I'll either sell over Marketplace or Swappa. I usually sell my old phones on swappa for a decent rate
Piggy-backing off OP, I'm wondering about the best way to dispose of devices with storage.
E.g., I have old cellphones that don't even power on anymore, but I'm fairly certain I didn't clear all data off them. Do I need to 'shred' these drives somehow? Or can I just wave magnets over them??
Magnets won't erase the phones because all the storage is solid state.
I've been using encryption options on my last few android devices, so in theory a device reset that clears those keys should be sufficient to consider it erased. Google's "find my phone" feature for android also has a remote erase procedure. Overall, my confidence in all those options is "probably good enough".
It's a little murky because many phones require you to log in with the last Google account used after a reset. I have no idea if that information is stored on the phone (and if so, how) or it's part of the carrier activation, but either way it means something about the old phone is lingering. If you have doubts, I would only consider total destruction a sure thing.
If any of the devices have SD cards, you should definitely remove them and either keep or destroy them.
If the device doesn't power on like you say, i would open up the device and physically remove the hard drive. Then destroy the hard drive with a hammer.
Okay, I'll probably have to do this route for the two phones among my old electronics.
I recently dealt with this.
In my case it was an android phone, meaning I could run a terminal emulator. My steps:
Zeroing out an SSD is a horrible idea, but in my case I was making an insurance claim and getting rid of the phone anyway so I didn't care about that.
I usually keep the item if it's not broken. Then when the day of "big cleaup" comes in a few years I often throw it out (that means getting it to the local "collection yard" where they have different contaners for different waste and items. I hope it goes for recycling from there (as it is intended to).
Sometimes I try to give the items to.my relatives or friends - I have two old (but still perfectly fine) 3TB HDDs now that I really don't want to throw away, but I have no real use for them. I may prolong their useful lifetime if someone takes them for some non-critical data (like backup installers of GOG games as a cold storage or whatever).
I don't like seling stuff if it's not really valuable. I don't like the hassle of bartering for a few bucks and then sending it somewhere or whatever... I'd rather just give it away or make it "lifetime lease" - if I ever really need it I might ask for return of the item. If it can't be returned (because it's dead, it's critical for that someone or was given away on the same terms and is critical or useful to the third person) then good riddance :-D
I might sell graphics card if it was worth 100€, but I won't do the same with one that is worth 10€... either giveaway or stays at home until big cleanup day.
I tend to hang on to things for a little while as spares, in case of breakage with whatever replaced it. Once it does come to selling something that I find very useful is to decide on the absolute floor price I'm willing to accept for a given item, and if it hasn't sold within 4 weeks, I'll just donate it to a good cause or recycle as required. I would much rather not have the thing cluttering up my environment than hold out for a few extra pounds.
Things that still work I tend to sell for a soft price so they go quickly, but not so low that traders are going to try make a profit. When it is broken it goes to be recycled.
I usually keep stuff around (more than I should) as a spare. Once I come to my senses, I try to sell it on eBay. When the price of shipping and fees approaches the price I can sell at, then I'll either donate or recycle it.
Since I'm in the apple ecosystem, I usually trade in my old device for some money off of my new one. I do have some tech that I either give away to people like old fitbits (I have one now that I don't want to give away and am looking at e-waste recycling. We're also looking at getting new tvs because both of ours are 8 years old and one won't stay connected to the internet (it's a smart TV) and the other has burn-lines in 1/3 of the screen. We're trying to hold out with both until we start to see some sales. There's some e-waste services here, but it'll be interesting to see how we can get two tv's to them.
For old consoles I tend to keep them. While you may not be interested in using it now, 5-10 years from now you may desire to play some classic xbox games and generally the experience is nicer on the original hardware than an emulator. Homebrew can also give a new lease of life to an older console, for example I homebrew'd my childhood Wii allowing me to emulate older games that pre-date me (nes, snes, some sega stuff, n64 etc.) many of these games never releasing on the Wii's virtual console (why was only one n64 mario party released???). It also saved me some money when buying GameCube games since I can just emulate a memory card on my SD instead of having to pray that a 20 year old card won't die.
A lot of those other devices you could either re-purpose (e.g. an old desktop can make a great media server, or a PC to hook up to your TV for emulation etc.) or they can be sold / donated. The only major caveat I have is the storage mediums on PCs / phones, which I would much prefer destroying or at the very least securely wiping them. If they were encrypted then wiping them should be fine.
I prefer to give electronics I don't need away to friends and family - whatever is left goes to recycling.
For any unused electronics that still have value, I try to sell as soon as possible before they lose their value. I think it's pretty common for people to store the previous phone or laptop or gaming console after getting a new one, but that's really inefficient assuming no sentimental or collectible value. The analogy I like to make is if your old phone can sell for $300, that's like having a stack of 300 one dollar bills in your drawer and every other day you take out one of those dollars and throw it in the trash, because your $300 phone might be worth ~$150 next year. If you don't want to throw away money, then you should sell things while they still have value.
Anyway, I sell phones on Swappa, large items like speakers or monitors on craigslist, and everything else on ebay.
Having a back-up phone is pretty useful though. You can still have something in case something catastrophic happens to the new one, or you can repurpose it as a single task object. I use my old one as a makeshift babyphone for an ill pet, and also as a OBD-II recorder for my car.
I used to think that a backup phone might be useful, but it's never there when I actually need it. Phone fell out of your pocket while getting out of a taxi in a foreign country? Phone slipped out of your hands and smashed on the floor of a ski cabin with no cell phone stores in town? No backup phone unless you bring it in your luggage everywhere you go. If my phone dies while I'm near home I'll just go to a store and get a new one with the extra money I have saved from always selling my old electronics.
This definitely depends on how often you upgrade your devices, how much value remains, etc. but if my previous phone is worth $300 and a dedicated security camera is $50, I'd rather sell the $300 phone and get the $50 camera.
To each their own. I've repurposed old phones for various things. My current old phone is my dedicate hot spot when internet goes down. Wife and I work from home so having a dedicated phone I can flip to hot-spot mode is great, its rare, but happens. I put a pay as you go sim in the phone. If I need data, I buy it then use it. Great for traveling too.
I have another I use as my bike phone. When I'm biking(Road, MTB and BMX) I don't really care if phone gets knocked around. I preload the maps, turn on the software that track speed and cadence then head out. Having a spare phone is great IMHO.
Well, that all is outside the scope of the discussion. If you're using the device for its intended purpose, that's the point of owning it. The original discussion is about old devices you don't use anymore. If you are basically done using the phone and would either store it or use it for something a very cheap device could do just as well or better, then sell the phone ASAP for maximum value.
Of the devices is an Android phone, but it's bricked—dead Nexus 5X. I don't think I can access it with a tmux anymore.
Donate to a children's hospital.
If you don't need the money, consider re-using the hardware for projects - maybe trying linux or setting up a NAS? There might be some charity shops specialising in IT and teaching people how to use computers you could donate it to?
I prioritize preservation and longevity, so I'll keep and maintain them, and freely give them to anyone who will find them useful. I have a small collection of various devices capable of Web browsing which I use for testing my sites for backwards compatibility and retro-friendliness.
You don't just keep them all in a shoe box? I kid but really I've got to do something with that Galaxy 2 I've got kicking around.
I pretty much keep everything that still works. I'm a bit of a hoarder but I've found lives for so much excess electronics (hand me downs, spares, test bench stuff) that I keep stuff on hand. I'm currently trying to pare down the amount of cables though. Third party, unlabeled and such is meeting the recycle bin if I have first party or higher quality stuff on hand.
In our area we have
https://ithacareuse.org/
which is the obvious choice for me in my area, I also make a point to going to both of their locations every week because I am always interested in interesting A/V gear. I am hoping one of these days to find a 3-head tape deck and a projector for doing a Pepper's Ghost project.
I'd think the VR stuff would sell on Ebay, I am seriously thinking about picking up one for software development and viewing stereograms.
I usually sell them or give them away for free on internet marketplaces like Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace depending on how old/functional they are. I've never really had any trouble getting rid of electronics, there's always someone interested if you can find them. In the past I also knocked together working low-level PCs from spare parts I had around and sold them for cheap to people who just wanted something to do word processing or surf the net.