The common adage that “if a deal is too good to be true, it probably isn’t true” is being flipped on its head this morning after we spotted an oddity in the form of a 15-year-old PC.
The editor at NAG, Regardt van der Berg, shared the post below on X (formerly Twitter) early on Monday morning. The post shows off an Acer PC that sports components that were released in 2008, being advertised for R39 000.
The full specs of this PC are:
- 8GB DDR2,
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.8GHz,
- Two NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX (512MB),
- 280GB HDD @ 10 000RPM,
- Water cooled processor,
- Windows Vista Home Premium,
- Blue-Ray (sic) ROM.
All of this can be yours for R39 899 from Makro. However, Makro isn’t the only retailer that is advertising this desktop PC. The same computer can be found on First Shop and Laptop Direct.
To illustrate how badly priced this is, Makro is also selling a prebuilt gaming PC that houses an AMD Ryzen 7 7700 CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 4070 for R39 500. For those keeping score that’s less than the PC mentioned above.
We called Makro this morning to confirm the price and availability of this machine. We were told by the call centre agent that the product was sold by a third-party and as such it couldn’t comment on the pricing or whether the product was available.
We understand that Makro doesn’t set the price here, however, the price of a new PC being lower than a 15-year-old model is bizarre, to say the least.
We then put in a call to First Shop and things weren’t much better.
After providing the sales agent with the SKU number the agent said that the spec seemed strange. When we asked about the price, the agent said that the PC was likely old stock that was trying to be sold. We asked the agent if they’d be happy selling a 15-year-old PC at a 2023 price to a customer and they said that if somebody wanted to buy it they wouldn’t stop them, but added they wouldn’t recommend the PC to a customer.
If we were in charge of the retailer we’d delist the PC immediately because it appears to be rather dangerous.
We say this because the PC ships with Windows Vista, an operating system that was retired by Microsoft in April 2017. The operating system hasn’t received an update since 2017 and this represents a major security risk. What’s more, is that even with what looks like a decent spec PC (for 2008) we very much doubt you’d be able to run a newer version of Windows on this computer.
You can absolutely forget about running Windows 11 for example as this requires a TPM 2.0 module, a piece of tech that wasn’t launched until six years after the components in this PC were made available.
We’ve fired off an email to First Shop’s marketing team to find out why this PC is being sold for the price it’s listed at and we’ll be sure to provide an update should the retailer respond.
For now, our recommendation is to steer clear of this PC and the retailers selling it. The price is absurd and frankly, anybody trying to sell a 15-year-old PC at a 2023 price has us wondering what other liberties that retailer is taking with prices on their stock.
