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about this btw - is it just me or is there something damned odd going on with the secondary market for electronics above a certain threshold of sophistication?
What I mean is: why aren't thrift stores crammed with 2009 Android phones? They have CRT televisions, but no iPhone 2Gs. They have tape decks but no Pentium 4 laptops.
Flat screen televisions took literal decades to start showing up, and the ones that do are almost all 4:3 or absolute bottom of the barrel (eg westinghouse) 720p
But people are buying them in droves, like they always did. Where are they going? And I mean, this isn't idle speculation - the secondary market was very important to me growing up. Being 20 in 2019 and hitting the thrift circuit must suck shit
there are a bunch of replies to this (sorry don't have time to reply to everyone individually) that I don't disagree with but my point was less "I don't understand what's happening" and more "oh boy this sucks shit"
I can speculate about where they're going, but A) we don't really know for sure and B) it's part of a thing i might call Trash Extractionism
basically, the secondary market is and was always part of an ecosystem; "secondary" because capitalism doesn't want it and wants it to die. it's like raccoons living in a junkyard. nobody *wants* them to take refuge in the dead washing machines, but they're doing it
i realize that pentium 4 laptops suck shit, and sorta my point is that when i was 20, CRT TVs were already garbage nobody wanted and nobody was buying new, but I bought them anyway because I had no other choice and i got mileage out of them. same with bad old PCs.
ancient smartphones aren't useless. i knew people using 2009 Androids in 2017. yeah it sucks but you can do *something* with it. instead everyone is cycling at breakneck pace into new devices and, seemingly, nobody "needs" these old devices
the thing is, as someone pointed out, you can ship smartphones. they're extremely dollar-dense garbage, so it's actually worth it for a business to ship them to another country, or put them on ebay
i fucking hate that, because we used to have *some* kind of ecosystem. not to jack off to trickle down economics too much, but prior to ebay's seeming explosion in popularity with businesses prices were way more variable because you were limited to who you could sell to locally
if you can't easily reach buyers in other markets, you don't have the luxury of saying "well i'm not going to price this item that's physically in my brick and mortar store, that used to belong to someone in Renton, at a dime below what I could sell it to a guy in Ohio for"
the flip side is the notion that someone in ohio COULD buy a smartphone that otherwise wouldn't be in their local market AT ALL on ebay. i posit that the problem here is I have no idea who's recklessly making all these ebay purchases
tons of love for everyone reading this but if you buy a smartphone or a laptop on ebay you're out of your god damn mind. my brain automatically filters out listings for modern electronics like nigerian scam emails.
so to summarize: if five million people in Seattle bought Android phones in 2010, I suspect that maybe a few thousand of those are still here, and the rest were sent out of the area to maximize *someone's* profit, resulting in more people needing to buy brand new phones now
