Every few months someone asks us the same thing. There is a laptop in the cupboard, it stopped working in 2021, and they want to know whether it is worth anything or whether they should just throw it out.
It is almost always worth something. How much depends on things you can check yourself in about five minutes.
A dead laptop is not worth zero
People assume a laptop that does not switch on has no value. That is not how scrap works. Nobody buying a dead laptop is buying a computer. They are buying the materials inside it, and those do not care whether it boots.
Inside a normal laptop there is aluminium in the body, copper in the wiring and the heatsink, a lithium-ion battery, and a motherboard carrying small quantities of gold, silver and palladium on the contacts and connectors. A hard drive has its own aluminium and rare earth magnets. None of that stops being valuable because the screen went black.
What changes is which of the two prices applies.
Two different prices
There are really two markets for an old laptop, and the gap between them is large.
Working, or repairable. If it switches on and runs, it can be refurbished and resold. That is worth considerably more than scrap, because someone will use it as a computer again. A five year old machine that still works is not scrap yet.
Scrap. If it does not switch on, or the repair costs more than the machine is worth, it gets broken down for materials. The price is driven by weight, by what metals are in it, and by the current rate for those metals.
The most common mistake is assuming the first category when you are in the second, or the other way round. A machine with a cracked screen and a dead battery often still sells as working, because both parts are replaceable. A machine that took liquid damage to the board usually does not, however clean it looks.
What actually moves the number
These are the things that make a difference, roughly in order of how much they matter.
- Does it switch on. The single biggest factor. Try it on a known-good charger before you decide it is dead. Chargers fail more often than laptops do.
- Age. A machine from the last four or five years has resale value. Anything much older is usually scrap regardless of condition, because nobody wants to buy a 2013 machine even if it runs.
- Whether the parts are still there. A laptop with its RAM, drive and battery removed is worth noticeably less than a complete one. If you pulled the drive out for privacy, that is fine, but say so.
- Weight and build. A heavy older machine with an aluminium body and a proper cooling system carries more metal than a thin plastic one. Counterintuitively, older and heavier is sometimes better as scrap.
- The battery. A healthy lithium-ion pack is worth collecting. A swollen one is a safety problem and needs handling differently. More on that below.
Things that do not matter as much as people think
Scratches on the lid. A missing key. The original box. A worn palm rest. None of these change a scrap price and most of them barely change a refurb price. People sometimes hold on to a laptop for months because they feel embarrassed about its condition. The condition of the plastic is not the point.
The brand matters less than you would expect too, once a machine is in scrap territory. At that stage it is metal and board, and the logo on the lid does not change what is inside.
Why we do not quote a figure over the phone
We are often asked for a number before we have seen anything, and we do not give one. There are two reasons, and neither is evasiveness.
First, metal rates move. Copper and aluminium are traded commodities and the rate today is not the rate last month. Any number we printed on a website would be wrong within weeks, and a wrong number quoted confidently is worse than no number.
Second, we cannot tell from a description whether a machine switches on, whether the board is intact, or whether the battery is safe. Those are the things that decide the price, and they need someone to look.
What we do instead: we come to you, we look at the item in front of you, and we tell you the price before anything is loaded. If you do not like it, nothing moves and you have paid nothing. Collection is free either way.
Before you hand it over
Two things worth doing, and neither takes long.
Deal with the data. Deleting your files is not the same as removing them. If the machine still switches on, sign out of your accounts and do a factory reset. If it does not switch on, you can pull the drive out and keep it, or ask us to destroy it. We would rather you kept the drive than worried about it.
Check the battery. If the laptop body has started to bulge, or the trackpad sits proud of the case, or the base does not sit flat on a table, that is a swollen battery. Do not press it, do not puncture it, and do not leave it in a hot car. Tell us when you book so we bring the right handling for it.
What happens to it afterwards
Machines that can be repaired get repaired. The rest are broken down so the materials go back into use rather than into the ground. The lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper in a laptop are all things India currently imports. Every one recovered here is one that does not have to be bought in.
That is the part of this work that we actually care about, and it is the reason we would rather collect a dead laptop than have it sit in a cupboard for another four years.
Getting it collected
We collect from doors across Hyderabad and Bengaluru. You tell us roughly what you have, pick a slot that suits you, and we come to you. The price is agreed in front of you after we have looked at the item, and you are paid on the spot. Coming to collect costs you nothing.
Book at scrapwise.in, or send a message to +91 99931 99945 if it is easier to describe over WhatsApp.
