eBay’s most Expensive ThinkPad – 360PE $200,000 USD

Go search for the highest ThinkPad on eBay right now! Oh right, someone might buy it, so lets go screenshot! I’d hate to say something obvious but, this page isn’t an attack on the seller. Please don’t message, harass or threaten them either, I am not trying to incite anything against them.

other than links, if you see red font, its because I written this while drunk and it will probably contain errors or some shit.

How did it get so expensive? Because a potential buyer asked too many questions! Now I don’t hate on this guy, but I find the story pretty the whole ordeal amusing. Is this thing worth that much? I highly doubt it. To be quite honest, it’s probably not that much of a rare model, however it is pretty fuckin cool! oh and this guy is def not the reason why ThinkPads are going up, social media, eBay & news outlets might be the one to blame. Generally people have been restoring old items or machines, and it’s from how technology has been evolving, quite a number of people see new machines are made for planned obsolescence… hence why some would think buying old equipment is better, because it was built to last.

Sources:

• WorthPoint Archive of one of the old listings
• ThinkPad Forum’s Link – Rare & Expensive 360PE
• Thinkpad Forum Link – IBM ThinkPad 360PE-2620 on eBay
• Google site webpage

How did it get so big?

I don’t know when this price got so high, searching in the TP Forum and it does pop up quite a bit there, because of the absurdity of the price. Looking for the first posts user Oglon3r made a thread in Aug 2013, and NorwayPad made one in Nov of the same year. However in twisting_edge’s thread made in Aug 2015, Khipata said that the listing has been up for 4 years. That means this laptop has been on the market since 2011… now I have came across it a few times when searching for old ThinkPads. I don’t remember when I have came across it for the first time, but I do remember the old photos it had, the ones when it was photographed outside.

“First. I’d like to offer my apologies. The 360P that is listed for $20,000 is my fault. The seller got it at an estate sale and listed it for $300 as is. I asked some questions and explained how to open the unit to remove the battery so he could test it with the power on.
He went crazy and the price jumped up to $700, then $1500. Now it’s where it is.
I notice it still has parts of the original disk preload like IBM ThinkWrite, but that’s not worth $20K to me.”

Fultontech

Now is it 100% Fulton’s fault? Nah not even, he’s not the seller who listed it at that price. To be quite honest, I don’t know where this guy got this idea from. There was a Sotheby’s auction that was selling Apple memorabilia, which one bidder paid over 1 million USD for the actual contract that Jobs, Wozniak & Wayne signed. Maybe the seller came across ComputerWorld’s article, but that was released in December 2011. But in 2010 there was a Christie’s auction that sold one of the 200 built Apple-1 computers for $213,000 USD. I am assuming this is what got the seller to price the 360PE at 200K.

Maybe it was sometime around 2010 or 2011 when the price jumped up. When I was digging around, i was trying to find the original listing. But I couldn’t as eBay deleted old listings now and doesn’t keep them in the servers. WorthPoint is a price trending website for eBay for real serious collectors and antique resellers, and it has a page of the old listing. There’s only 4 pictures shown, but they look similar to the ones I’ve remembered, the ones where he took photos outside on concrete.

Now eBay is fucking annoying when it comes to their descriptions these days. Before people had all sorts of formatting, cell content and even flash shit running. But this guy has some pictures in his listing and text on it, however it wasn’t formatted like some of the big e-waste sellers I’ve bought from. Something else I thought was weird is that one of the eBay pictures has a QR code, which goes to the eBay listing. Why would they upload an image that links back to the same eBay Page? Because that QR Code image is from another webpage!

If you open a picture in the description in a new tab, it has a URL from google sites, but one of the /htmlshit/ has the seller’s username newrssn. So if you simply erase whateveritscalled.jpg and hit enter. Viola! You came across the webpage that was it was originally formatted to. So my intro webdesign college course came into use somehow! Anyways the page is set up exactly like the description. The user has the same pictures in their description that’s in the eBay gallery. So are the descriptions photos any different than the standard eBay ones are? Well yes, they were the photos he had uploaded from the computer with full exif data info! Whenever you upload a photo on eBay, it strips EXIF and IPTC data, so essentially we can’t find things like shutter count, when the photo was taken or where it was at. Like many of us, we have made mistakes when it comes to uploading pictures on the web, please don’t damn this person for honest mistakes.

The pictures on his webpage are uploaded or copied from the original source, their cellphone. Perhaps this is Google’s Sites fault for not applying the same EXIF & ITPC stripping, but it can be a blessing for investigations. ExifData.com says the default picture was taken on 2012:10:10 12:38:28 to be exact. And looking at the Google sites activity page, this fellow made the page in 2014. Even though the google page was made at a much later date than the eBay listing, I’m sure the seller got annoyed of having to copy/paste the eBay ad. I have a feeling they did this so they can advertise on other forums or e-commerce sites.

So when did it first come to the market? We may never know, unless this dude brings out an AMA or publicly talks about it. After researching…. I might of been wrong with remembering when I saw old listing. I could of sworn that the photos of it on the concrete was the overpriced one. But on worthpoint, that listing shows that it is a 360P, not PE, and there are no marks nor am I able to correctly see the Serial or MTM type… but from the exif data, we can say it’s been on sale since 2012, and if Khipata is right (not that I doubt them, just need hard evidence) then it means this machine has been $200K starting 2011.

Is it really worth that?

Nah, not by a long shot. There are plenty of other ThinkPads that can be worth more and other systems that are much more rarer due to production numbers. Any signed ThinkPad by me adds about $200 of value to it. Jokes aside, sought after are ThinkPads that were used by NASA! A few TPF members have bought them from auctions, but I’m not sure if we will ever get a space station modded ThinkPad… Because the US government did some dumb shit to destroy all field used equipment, so we can’t get a hold of those wonderful V12 tank engines anymore.

So NASA ThinkPads might be out of the question, next would be pre-production types. The 800 series ThinkPads are rare and obscure solely due to their high price, niche market, & heavily sought after for being the only PowerPC chipped ThinkPads, oh and some run AIX! Perhaps the 550BJ or 555BJ are rare, I wanted one, but settled for the Canon variant of which they were based & built from. What’s rarer than a Japan/East Asia market ThinkPad? There’s some South Korea IBM ThinkPads that have the LG logo slapped onto them. Maybe the gray/beige Thinkpads made for the German market? Actually there has been a few gray ThinkPads before Lenovo did the change in the X1C… there’s a few iSeries, which aren’t really sought after thanks to their build quality, but because so many of them died, I guess its rare to have a shitty built ThinkPad still working. the 240Z had a iSeries counterpart…. iSeries 1124? 701C and maybe 701Cs are a staple for a cool, retro ThinkPad, as it wasn’t the rarest one, however thanks to it’s butterfly keyboard, it will impress just about everyone from being a boring laptop like all others.

Aye, so many fucking ThinkPads. with that said, none of these are even fucking close to this 200K price.

Collecting ThinkPads on a budget

Finding the right collectible ThinkPad can be super tricky, time consuming or just lucky. Currently old ThinkPads have been on the rise, and I recommend going to an electronic recycler and going thru their pallet of junked laptops. If it’s sold as is, untested, unless it’s truly a remarkable model, I don’t see spending more than $150 for it.

In some cases the best deals you can get for a ThinkPad are the ones with the hardly any information in the title, and you have to see whats in the photos. This can be a good thing, as poorly listed items can give you time to research before biting the bullet. From what I am seeing now, most of the e-Waste sellers def know what they are doing, as some models are going for a lot now thanks to bidding auctions. Again if you’re looking to start collecting, try local thrift stores, surplus auctions, business liquidations & ofc electronic recycling facilities. I wish I could give you all a script to gain their trust, but I have come across a few collection sites which say shit like “Its illegal for us to sell other people’s electronics they’ve donated” kindly fuck off m8, you’re still selling to the highest bidder for green boards & recyclable material, stop pretending like if it’s not going to China for cheaper labor to dismantle it. If they are doing auctions, and the price starts off reasonably low, like other modern hardware they auction off, there’s no reason to hate on them.

Another great source is to buy from Yahoo JP Auctions, there is a plethora of ThinkPads there that we don’t get. Like almost all of the 200 series, PS/55 pre-thinkpads, & that unwanted G50. In some cases you cannot bid on these auctions, so you’ll need a proxy bidder, and a service that obtains your shipment, then ships it to you. It’s going to cost extra, but it could be worth it… as some systems that sell under $100 in Japan, sell for more than $200 here. With that said, there are other items you can export from Japan that have much better profit percentages.

Comparing it to other Pen ThinkPads

The special release beta-test 2621 ThinkPad was the first pen computer by IBM in April 1992, followed by the official 700T, the Japanese variant PS/55 T22sx which all released before the year ended. In may 1993 the 710T came out, which brought the docking capability of the T22sx, which the 700T lacked, but had a PS/2 port. September had brought the 750P, which was a 750 that had a built in digitizer and had a strange hinge/lid that sort of actuated like a tall see saw. IBM was not the first to the market with one, as the GRiD Convertible 2260 had been released in 1992. The 710T was strange because IBM decided to build their own 486 rather than using Intel’s chip, but still went back to intel in next models listed. In addition all systems had a 9.5″ monochrome STN display.

May 1992 the 730T came out with a slight redesign to the case materials, and then IBM decided to make a 360P and 360PE in October. I find this rather peculiar because they went to build the 300 series rather than the 700, so it was a downgrade in case materials and hardware spec. The original 300 was built by IBM, but I don’t know if these were outsourced as well. The old models still confuse me to this day, the 330C without trackpoint, but the 360 does have one, which was the successor to the 350. However in the 700 series, the 750 successor was the 755, and then later on the 760, but IBM did have a 355 out the same year too. There’s some info about them being more Japan based systems (possibly even part of the RIOS joint venture) which were rebadged as ThinkPads, if that makes sense.

Anyways the 360P was a 33MHz Intel 386DX machine, while the 360PE had a 50MHz 486 DX2, and an audio controller (thinkwiki doesn’t say if the 360P came with one). But one thing was that these systems have a color DSTN display, so it had a higher refresh rate but nothing near the TFTs. Hold up… im getting mixed results if the 750P came with color screen or not, english ThinkWiki says it did, but thinkwiki.de says it doesn’t & has a photo. Don’t mean to spread FUD, but Im gonna say 360P/PE came with color and 750P didn’t 😉

OK. So with all that said, is this thing remarkable? well yea, it is. I mean unless the 750P came with a color display, the build material is probably better than the 360PE variant. However the CPU performance isn’t as good. But even then IBM didn’t stop making pen computers, the 730TE came out in October 1995 and it had a color screen too. There was a japan only non-ThinkPad, 2435 that may of been based on the Panasonic AL-H0 (CF-01?) but in ThinkPad aesthetic. Then in Jan 1998 there was the 9103, only in Japan as well. The last laptop that IBM made which had a touch screen (unless we count those US Robotics PDA things) was the 2001 TransNote. This machine is the oddest out of all, based upon a X22 ThinkPad, it had a pen digitizer but it opened up like a portfolio… So on the right, or left if you have a left handed model, was a fullsize A4 notepad so you can write on with your digitizer, because it has a sensor to input the letters you write… based Jeff Hawkins did all the footwork pioneering hand/pen input with his Graffiti pen recognition system.

Conclusion?

It’s 200K wayy too fucking much. It’s not one of the 50 surviving Apple-I computers, its not a Silicon Graphics workstation for N64 development, it’s not a CRAY super computer, it’s not an old Pixar workstation, it’s not the Leapfrog. It’s not worth $200K, and in my opinion, it’s not worth $15000 USD.