It’s become a hallmark of the 2020s that when a hot new tech item launches, inevitably it sells far above it’s MSRP price, at least initially. The Apple Vision Pro is no different, with the added factor that for those of us outside of the US, buying from a scalper is the only option.
The initial launch was heavily hyped, but that seems to be dying down, with many people finding that while the product is cool, it’s not all that practical or polished. What’s surprising to me is that Apple is supposedly not going to have a v2 out before 2026. I strongly suggest you watch Mutahar (SOG)’s video if you want more of an idea of how useful the product is.
The Data
Since the Vision pro launched, I have been scraping & collecing data from eBay on the average prices. I had partially forgotten about the project until I happened to notice the files on my server.
After applying some simple processing, we end up with a usable dataframe of possible vision pros.
Of Bots & Boxes
Scalping is a competitive game, many ebay sellers will use titles like these to try and fool their competitors bots. Many of these operators will use bots to try and buy up undervalued hardware for their own resale. These are easy enough to kill by simply banning the word box.
Another problem is blatant scams, there’s no easy way to filter them out (I could set a price cutoff, but that could avoid genuine sellers). It’s hard even as a regular user to figure out who’s lying, so I couldn’t hope to do it heuristically.
It seems eBay are generally pretty good at purging these accounts, as we did see a suspicious dip, but it was reverted.
The Chart
Chart released under CC-By-4.0 please attribute Shinoji Research.
You can download all of the data here (public domain as facts cannot be copyrighted, credit always appreciated): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zbN3GunW66rzTjk8rnMMZtVyggMUEfMm?usp=sharing. An unfortunate note is that any “top selling” item has had it’s seller name replaced simply with the name Top, otherwise the scraper seems to have worked pretty well.
For a few weeks in April, it seems that scammers may have dragged the average down, but then it recovers. The 256 GB model has an MSRP of $3599 and is currently selling around $3700 on eBay, a far cry from the almost $5000 it started at.
Another factor is that as availability improves, and some early buyers are now past the return window, some of these used items are genuine dissatisifed customer sales, rather than scalpers. The lack of scalping profits will also improve availablity as scalpers have no incentive to buy up new stock.
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