Don’t Pay Idiotic Prices For An Apple Watch Pre-Order

Apple put its Watch up for pre-sale orders on Friday afternoon, and predictably, pre-orders were brisk, with wait times now blowing out markedly. Equally predictably, you can now pay a stupid amount for a pre-order on eBay.

Macrumors notes that it didn’t take long for pre-orders to start “selling” on eBay, pointing to one pair of pre-orders with more than double their asking price. At the time of writing, a quick search finds more than 400 pre-orders “selling” on eBay, with price upticks ranging from 10 per cent to more than 100 per cent.

Do I really need to point out why that’s a terrible idea?

Very well, I shall, just in case. For a start, while pre-orders are now sitting with availability, according to Apple as I write this, in “June”, the initial batch of pre-orders have their own wobbly pre-order window. As such, it’s still a case of pay now, wait regardless. The Watch you buy will still be the same Watch even if you do get it in June.

The bigger problem here, however, is that the Watch pre-orders are rather strongly tied into an individual Apple ID or Credit Card, and it wouldn’t take much at all for somebody to “sell” their pre-order to you and then simply change either shipping details or Apple ID details (presuming they supplied those as part of the transaction) leaving you high and dry.

You could chase the seller or eBay for non-delivery, but that’s a headache that’s best avoided. The one thing you couldn’t do in that instance is chase up Apple, because in that case it wouldn’t be the vendor actually selling you the Watch. You wouldn’t necessarily know that you’d been ripped off until after the Watch shipping date, at which point you’d then be stuck waiting until June anyway.

tldr; version: Don’t buy an Apple Watch pre-order from eBay or anywhere else. Just don’t.

Apple Watch Pre-Orders Hit eBay With Asking Prices Up to $2,000 [MacRumors]