Update 3:47 p.m. ET 12/23/13: The seller informed us that his Mac Pro includes 16GB of RAM.
There’s nothing new about people selling stuff on eBay for significantly more than it’s worth. It’s fairly common practice to take advantage of product shortages to in order to make bucks on the online auction site, as we’ve seen video game consoles and other tech products. Now we’re seeing it with the 2013 edition of the Mac Pro.
An eBay user by the name of “me23andme” is trying to cash in with their new Mac Pro by selling it for $9,500. While there’s one configuration of the Mac Pro that sells for $9,599, this doesn’t appear to be it.
According to the item’s page, this particular Mac Pro sports an Intel Xeon E5 3.5 GHz six-core processor, a 256GB SSD and a pair of AMD FirePro D300 graphics cards each with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM. However, it’s unclear whether the Mac Pro being sold by “me23andme” contains 12GB of DDR3 RAM or 16GB of DDR3 RAM. The part of the page labeled “Item specifics” indicates that the system contains 16GB of RAM. The description of the Mac Pro below that, on the other hand, states that it contains “12GB (three 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory configurable to 16GB (four 4GB), 32GB (four 8GB), or 64GB (four 16GB)16GB (four 4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memoryConfigurable to 32GB (four 8GB) or 64GB (four 16GB).” The fact that “Configurable” appears next to the other options seems to indicate that the system runs on 12GB of RAM, even though “Item specifics” indicates otherwise. We reached out to the seller for clarification and will update the story accordingly.
For what it’s worth, based on the configuration offered by this eBay seller’s Mac Pro, the same setup with 12GB of RAM would cost $3,499 if one were to buy from Apple. Bumping that up to 16GB would drive the cost up by $100 to $3,599. Either way, the Mac Pro offered by “me23andme” is being sold for much more than double its going retail price. There’s some interest too, even at that price: there are currently four watchers with their eye on the desktop, and three offers have been submitted as of this writing. However, none of them were accepted, and the amounts of the offers are hidden, so it’s unclear whether the offers were fair or not.
What’s the most you would spend for a Mac Pro on eBay? Sound off in the comments below.
