It's the old "Supply and Demand" rule. Over time, there will be fewer and fewer Amigas around, so lower supply. Many of the people of my computer generation (80's and early 90's) who could only dream of such machines at the time, but couldn't afford it then, are now in a financial position to buy them. They are the ones driving up the demand.
I was fortunate to graduate from University in 1984. So I bought a A1000 when it came out in '85. Commodore had a program to upgrade it to an A2000 in 1988, so I got one of those. When my sister married in 1987, I got her an A500 as a wedding present.
About 15 years ago, I found an A2500 in a pawn shop. I traded the guy 5 IBM PS/2 systems my old company was getting rid of for it. The A2500 is a lot rarer than those IBM machines, so even more valuable today, especially since I did not pay anything for it.
About 5 years ago, someone on Ebay was getting rid of his A500 system for 1 penny. He (or more likely his wife) just wanted to get some storage space back in their garage. It's a good thing I had my van. I thought I was getting a basic A500 (which for 1 cent was already a good deal). Instead, I got a fully pimped-out A500 with a GVP A530 side-car (030 accelerator, 8 MB Fast RAM, and 170 MB HD), 2 MB Chip RAM upgrade, full ECS upgrade, an ICD Scan Doubler installed, a 1.3 and 2.04 ROM Switcher, a Commodore 1942 Bi-sync monitor, and loads of parts (floppy drives, Power supplies, etc...) and software (many of them boxed originals).
Then a couple years ago, my sister gave me back the A500, I gave her many years ago.
And last year, my brother gave me one of his spare A2000-based Video Toaster machines.
That's why I have quite a collection of Amigas. I also had a large collection of vintage Macintoshes (from the time an old company of mine was getting rid of them): Mac SE's, II CI's mostly but also some exotics like a Mac IIx, LC2, Plus, PowerBooks etc... I gave them away years ago, when my mother sold her house to move to a smaller place which is where I was storing them. Hated to get rid of them, but we only have so much space to store our toys. My rec room looks like an Amiga museum. But I'm glad I've kept them, especially seeing the value of these items rise. I may not be rich enough to have a classic car collection, but I have a pretty cool classic Amiga collection.
I wonder what other people's opinions are on the value of classic Amiga machines.
I haven't looked at Amiga stuff on eBay for years as I sold off all of my classic hardware years ago. I thought I'd have a look tonight to see what things were selling for these days and I was amazed.
I had 3 or 4 Blizzard PPC boards and at the time I sold them they went for about €180. I saw one sold recently for €1200?
I sold my Blizzard 1230 Mk IV for about €70. Now they seem to be going for €250.
I sold my BVision card for €90. One just sold there for €350.
Used A1200's used to sell for €30 to €40 now it's around €150.
My Phase 5 CSPPC+060 board I sold for €280-ish with 128MB RAM. I don't even know what that would be worth today, but a CSMKII with just the 060 sold for €600!
Are these prices more or less the norm these days? I was thinking of picking up some classic hardware again but at these prices it's difficult to justify when a middle-of-the-road classic system would end up costing me the price of a new retina MacBook Pro.
How much higher can Amiga prices go? This is 20 year old hardware and as beautiful as the machines are, they will eventually fail. Is it wise to be investing 4 figures on this stuff?
