Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage

I was in a Hard Off (Japanese used electronics store) just a week ago and found 10s of 8GB DDR4 ram sticks for around 1600 yen each (something like $10 USD). Some were ecc but others looked like ram modules from office pcs or something. It was in a rural area but still I would have thought they knew about the price hike. I guess not. Anyway I didn’t buy any so idk if they were working.

I'm all for re-using old but still perfectly usable hardware. Hopefully this will also lead to some optimisations on the software side

The upside of high prices (GPU, RAM, disk, etc.) is existing resources get better utilized.

I hung on to my 15 (?) year-old Intel motherboard, CPU, and 16 GBs of RAM; mostly because of e-waste guilt. I cannot believe this has value but here we are.

I also wish I built a new gaming rig during the summer last year.

I have an old PC that I built that I’ve been meaning to take to Hard Off. I wonder if it would if it would be better to sell the parts individually, or as a single unit. For reference, it has a Ryzen 9 3900x, 64 GB DDR4, an RX 5700 XT graphics card, and 512 GB NVME. Probably not worth much anymore, and I’ll probably just sell it as-is to save myself the effort of taking it apart. But Hard Off occasionally surprises me with how much they pay for a piece of old gear.

They want to buy it from you for peanuts, is what is missing from the article. Softmap buy your stuff at 1/10 of the actual original value and then sells it back to people at 5-6x what they bought it for.

I have never found Japan the home of gaming pc's anyway. It isn't quite like Seoul in that respect. I have shopped in Akibahara frequently in the last decade and noticed some PC gaming exclusive shops pop up and also go, including range of stock varying.

a mac/macbook would be good in this environment