The last thing left on my desk was a three-year-old iPad, and I was staring at it like it owed me money.
I paid $600 for it. In my head it was still worth, what, $450? It felt almost new. Then I actually looked up what the same model was selling for and the answer was $180. One hundred and eighty dollars. For a thing I still thought of as expensive.
That gap, between what I remembered paying and what the thing was actually worth, is the entire problem with pricing electronics. And I keep watching people fall into it when they move. They list the old laptop at "only" $700 because it was a $1,300 laptop once, and then it sits for three weeks while they wonder why nobody bites.
I'm in the middle of selling everything I own before I leave, so I've priced a lot of gadgets lately. Here's what I've figured out.
Electronics fall off a cliff, and the cliff is steeper than furniture
A couch loses maybe half its value over a few years and then kind of levels off. Electronics don't level off. They keep sliding, because the reason they're worth anything is that they're the current thing, and the current thing changes every year.
Roughly how it goes, in my experience:
Phones drop the hardest and the fastest. A flagship phone can lose a big chunk of its value the day the next model gets announced, before it even ships. If your phone is two generations back, price it like a budget phone, because that's what it competes with now.
Laptops depend almost entirely on the brand and the chip. A MacBook holds value shockingly well compared to a random Windows laptop of the same age. A three-year-old MacBook Air might still fetch 40 to 50 percent of what you paid. A three-year-old $800 PC laptop might fetch $150 if you're lucky, because there's a new one at that price with a faster chip.
TVs are fine for about two years, then they fall. The panel tech moves fast, sizes creep up, and last year's "great TV" is this year's "why is it so expensive used." A recent large TV can hold half its retail. A five-year-old TV is basically a giveaway, no matter how good it looked when you bought it.
Consoles are the weird exception. A PS5 or a current Xbox barely depreciates until the next generation lands, and sometimes goes up when there's a supply crunch. Consoles behave more like collectibles than gadgets. Price them close to what a new one costs, minus a little, and they move.
Small gadgets, the smartwatches and earbuds and tablets, follow the phone curve. Fast down, and hardware you can't reset or that's tied to an old account is close to worthless.
Check what things sold for, not what people are asking
This is the single biggest lever, and almost nobody uses it.
When you search Facebook Marketplace and see three of your headphones listed at $120, that number is a wish. It's what the seller hopes to get. You have no idea if any of them actually sold, or if they've been sitting untouched since March.
For electronics specifically, there's a better source: eBay's sold and completed listings filter. You search the exact model, then filter to sold items, and you see the real closed prices with dates. That's not a wish. That's money that actually changed hands. It's the closest thing to a stock ticker that used gadgets have, and it exists because electronics are standardized in a way furniture isn't. A "Sony WH-1000XM4" is the same object everywhere. A "grey couch" is not.
Do that check, take the middle of the recent sold prices, and you're already ahead of 90 percent of the people listing next to you. If eBay sold prices don't exist for your item, watch local listings over a few days and pay attention to which ones vanish. The ones that disappear fast were priced right. The ones that linger are the wishes.
I go deeper on pricing whole batches of stuff quickly in how to price 50 used items in one afternoon, if electronics are just one pile in a much bigger sale.
Sell it, recycle it, or e-waste it: know which pile it's in
Not every gadget is worth listing. Some of them cost you more attention than they'll ever return.
Worth selling: anything current-ish that a buyer would recognize and want. Recent phones, MacBooks, current-gen consoles, big TVs under a few years old, name-brand headphones, tablets that still get software updates, cameras, monitors. If a normal person would say "oh nice, I'd use that," list it.
Worth recycling or donating, not selling: the tangle of ancient chargers, the DVD player, the printer from 2014, the pile of HDMI cables, the old router your ISP wanted back anyway. These technically work, but the effort to list, message, and hand them off is worth more than the $8 you'd get. A charity or a buy-nothing group will take working stuff off your hands in one trip.
Worth actual e-waste handling: anything with a swollen battery, cracked screens that don't power on, dead laptops, corroded electronics. Please don't put these in the regular trash. Batteries in landfills are a genuine hazard, and most cities have a free e-waste dropoff or a Best Buy that'll take them. This is the "it's not money, it's just responsible disposal" pile.
The mistake I see is people trying to sell the printer-from-2014 pile and giving up on the whole sale because it felt like too much work. Sort ruthlessly first. Sell the stuff that's worth selling, dispose of the rest, and your actual sale stays clean and fast. That sorting instinct is the same thing that keeps a moving sale from dying, which I wrote about in why every moving sale stalls on day three.
The box and cables are worth real money, so keep them together
Here's a small thing that punches above its weight: accessories.
A console with both controllers, all the cables, and the original box sells faster and higher than a bare console, because the buyer doesn't have to go hunt down a $70 controller and a $25 cable afterward. A phone with its charger and the original box reads as "cared for" and moves quicker. Headphones with the case and the little bag and the airplane adapter feel complete.
The reason is simple. The buyer is doing math in their head. Bare unit means "and then I have to buy the missing pieces." Complete-in-box means "this is everything, I'm done." You can charge more for done.
So before you photograph anything, gather its stuff. Find the box if you still have it. Coil the cables next to it. Put the remote back. Then take one photo of the whole kit together. That photo does quiet work, and it lets you price at the top of your range instead of the bottom.
Wipe your data before the buyer shows up, not while they wait
I cannot stress this enough, and it's the part people forget in the chaos of moving.
Before you sell any device that stored your life on it, wipe it properly. Sign out of every account first. Then factory reset. On a phone, pull the SIM and the memory card, turn off Find My or the equivalent, and remove it from your account so it isn't locked to you. On a laptop, sign out of your cloud accounts and reset to factory. On a console, deactivate it from your profile so your library doesn't travel with it.
Do this the night before, calmly, not standing in a doorway while a stranger waits and your reset bar creeps along at 4 percent. A half-wiped device is how account details, saved passwords, and photos end up in someone else's hands. It's also how a sale falls apart, because a careful buyer will not, and should not, accept a device that's still signed into your account.
While we're on the topic of not handing strangers your private stuff, keeping your home address off the listing matters too. I wrote up the whole approach in how to outsmart online marketplace scammers.
Why priced-slightly-under sells same-day
Electronics are the one category where buyers can compare prices to the penny, because the model number is right there. That cuts both ways. Overprice by 15 percent and they know instantly, and they scroll past. Underprice by a little and they know instantly, and they message you in the first hour.
So here's the move for electronics, more than any other category: find the real sold price, then list a touch below it. Not a fire-sale, just enough that yours is the obvious best deal on that exact model in your area.
Let me put fake-but-realistic numbers on it. Say you've got a pair of Sony headphones. Retail was $350 when you bought them two years ago. You feel like they should be $250 because they still sound amazing. But eBay sold listings say the recent real number is around $150. So the honest market is $150, not $250. If you list at $250, you're the wish nobody buys. List at $140, ten dollars under the going rate, and you're the deal that clears before lunch. The difference between $140 and $150 is nothing to you. The difference between "sold today" and "still messaging tire-kickers in two weeks" is everything when you're about to put your life in a truck.
The reason under-market works so well on electronics is that the buyer isn't guessing whether it's a good price. They can check, in ten seconds, and yours wins. Compare that to a couch, where the buyer is nervously wondering if $200 is fair. With gadgets there's no wondering. Be the cheapest good one and you're done.
When I list my own electronics, I photograph the item with all its cables, ClearList's AI writes the listing and estimates a price from the model, and I nudge it a little under what the sold comps say. Everything I'm selling lives on one link, and the reservation queue quietly handles the part I hate most: when the first buyer ghosts, it auto-advances to the next person in line instead of me chasing anybody. Buyers pick a pickup slot, and my address only goes out once a slot is actually booked. It's free for the first three items, $20 up to fifty, $39 up to two hundred and fifty, and it doesn't take a cut of the sale. If you want the furniture-and-everything-else version of this same pricing logic, it's in how to price used furniture with AI.
That iPad? I stopped pretending it was worth $450. I checked the sold prices, saw the real number was around $180, wiped it clean, boxed it with its charger, and listed it at $170. It was gone by dinner.
The gadget doesn't care what you paid. It only knows what the next one costs. Price it for the buyer who can look that up in ten seconds, because that's exactly who's about to.