In case anyone was buying scrap computer towers last year for a couple dollars each in pallet lots, minus the hard drive of course, and was turning a bit of profit scrapping them, especially since a lot had cpu's with gold pins or gold caps and lots of gold finger ram, and you just now found out that those same old machines that originally came with windows Vista or other early operation system, are now going for 10 to 50 bucks each, still minus hard drive, as a lot of people are/were buying them to refurbish and resale, as there was a shortage of new machines available due to Covid.
You will quickly grasp that with that price jump, we scrappers who make our profit from demolition and selling to Boardsort are suddenly in a drought. No machines to scrap. Even the boxes with parts and a few boards showing loose are fetching three or four times what I can justify paying, based on the limited knowledge of the actual contents, seen only in a photograph.
Don't pity me just yet. I ain't getting any fatter, but still finding new items to forage. The good news is there is some industrial and commercial scrap entering the auction markets. A gaylord of controller boxes, fuse and switch panels, and the like can be had reasonably, sometimes, if a serious bidder doesn't see any item or machine part he can readily use. Most of the boxes and boards are from the late 80's or 90's, with items like new, but a quick search will show most of them outdated and replaced by other numbers. Another search of ebay will often also show that there are hundreds of these once in demand items, listed for sale, and not a single bid or sale in the last year.l
The good news is that most of the time, the seller knows that there isn't much demand for these things, so in order to dispose of them, they pile the box high, a general housecleaning, you might say.
I won one such gaylord this week, with a winning bid of $22. Nothing really in the photo to justify that bid, and nothing in the auctioneers printed listing, various electrical boxes and items. Three of the partial frames appeared to have once held computer componets, so I bid. Surprise, those three each had a large backplane board, total weight of the three, 14 pounds. Boards worth $42 in scrap, plus recovered original cost in steel and aluminum.
The boards are still out there: they just won't be in the familiar towers and laptops we expect. They may look more like your house breaker box /service entrance instead.

Scrappers in the tech category are facing a perfect storm.
We have covid driving the general computer industry to do what hobbyists used to specialise in: Frankenstein patching old and new.

We have multiple governments printing paper money like it’s infinite, pushing inflation worries and driving crypto coins and tokens to unprecedented heights. Of course we now have miners from everything from game boys and my prised SVHS deck miner to people reprogramming microwaves and coffee makers. (I haven’t actually mines a single token yet, SVHS is too slow!)

We have a sudden, unprecedented, and extreme revival of retro tech collecting.
$10+shipping 8088 systems went to $100 over night, kept going, and never came back down.

We have apple moving to its own architecture for CPUs, the first major time this has happened since TI in the mid 80s. Driving a nostalgia movement.

The scrap tech industry is looking at everyone buying and nobody selling. For the very first time in history.

Recycled stock is still less expensive than mine to board. So the upside is there’s little to worry about on pricing.
The catch is we’re suddenly looking at my what’s inside it posts as a source and not a side thought.
All of a sudden dissecting light bulbs looks realistic.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D