Time To Buy Used?

Here’s the thing about tariffs that may not be clear to folks just hearing numbers: They have a cascading effect.

Depending on how a good gets manufactured, it could be getting hit by tariffs multiple times over—as raw materials, components, and finished products may all get hit with tariffs at different parts of the manufacturing process.

Example: Generally, manufacturers make smartphones out of a mixture of metals, glass, and semiconductors. Intriguingly, a big chunk of the toughened Gorilla Glass that many smartphones use is made in Kentucky. Theoretically, this could lead to a situation where the glass gets made in the U.S., gets exported to China, and gets hit with a tariff. Then, while in China, the glass could then get put on a phone, then get exported back to the U.S. in finished form, where it might be hit with another tariff.

Long story short: Even if electronics tariffs stay down, we’re still likely going to feel the cascading effects of upstream tariffs. (And, side note, it might actually discourage phone-makers from using that Kentucky factory for their smartphone glass. So much for the whole point of the tariffs.)

That sucks for end-users, who are going to feel the pain when buying new computers or smartphones for years to come. And it’s ultimately unrealistic in terms of where the market is at.

But if there’s an upside to this, it’s that the used market remains full of wonder and worthy gadgets that are already behind American borders—knowledge that, if you’re savvy, could dull the pain of electronics buying in the short-to-medium term.

Back in 2019, I wrote a piece about the concept of “Upgrade Arbitrage,” in which I described how server and workstation components often find their way onto the used market at costs that mask their sheer computing power. There are downsides to this, most notably the fact that old server components are more energy-hungry than new machines, but this stuff is road-tested in way tougher environments than you’re going to experience in your apartment. (OK, the risk of cat hair entering the intake fan in a server rack is lower.)

My old Xeon that I acquired with this method is still in service, running as a Hackintosh via Proxmox. I did not buy my z420 from a site like eBay—rather, I did a deal with a dude off Craigslist—but I ended up building a relatively powerful machine very inexpensively. And the market has shifted a lot from there.

If I want to buy an old PC on a used-goods site, what are my options?

While workstation-grade desktops are still out there—and make excellent options for budget gaming rigs—many computers have gotten smaller, and that’s an opportunity for those who like to tinker. “TinyMiniMicro” machines, as the IT professional site ServeTheHome calls them, are essentially tiny old desktops of around 7 inches in width and depth—larger than a Mac Mini but significantly smaller than an Xbox. Fairly nondescript machines made by manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, they are basically everywhere—especially on the used market. Running a home server on one is a great choice, in part because there are so many of them. While it won’t compete with anything with a dedicated GPU, it is more than enough for tinkerers, and they’re often cheaper than a comparable mini PC. (ServeTheHome’s focus on TinyMiniMicros was directly inspired by shipping issues of a different kind—the supply challenges that the Raspberry Pi faced a couple years back.)

And of course, laptops spring eternal. Every three or four years, corporate environments upgrade employee work laptops, almost like clockwork. In many cases, those machines are still quite good—especially at the lower prices they carry on the secondary or even tertiary market. The nice thing about an old ThinkPad is that it’s built like a tank—and while processing speeds have started to improve faster than they did in the mid-2010s, it’s still more than possible to get on eBay and buy a banger of a used machine—one that actually supports Windows 11—for less than $300. (And don’t tell anyone I told you this, but a three-year-old mobile workstation laptop, like a ThinkPad P1, is likely to get you a lot of computing power for not a lot of money.)

By stepping back a generation or two and favoring machines that aren’t overly pretty or high-end (i.e. maybe skip the recent-gen MacBook Pros or Razer machines), you can get away with a good deal right now while avoiding some tariff pain. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to ensure some perfectly good tech avoids a landfill.

And don’t neglect the accessories, either. Recently, I bought a portable 4K monitor on ShopGoodwill, the kind of accessory that can cost upwards of $150 on Amazon. It likely started life as an office jockey’s backup monitor. I paid $13 plus shipping for it, and while it was missing some key components (namely, a cable to plug it in), it worked more or less perfectly, giving me access to a small screen on the go.

(Free tip: If you want to get a deal on ShopGoodwill, most of the auctions end between 10 and midnight EST, meaning that finding a last-second deal is more predictable than eBay is. But be prepared to pay for shipping.)

I mentioned this on Bluesky, and a friend of mine, inspired by my dumb luck, also bought one—and she just got it working this evening. Look, I’m not saying that you’ll be able to satiate all of your high-end gadget needs by leaning on Goodwill, BackMarket, or Facebook Marketplace. But given the uncertainty the electronics market is likely to face, now is the time to get creative on the used and refurbished market, because it’s not clear how much your next brand-new laptop is going to cost.