The long version

For most of its production run this was simply the newest 911, bought and driven by people who wanted an air-cooled Porsche and could still afford a fairly ordinary used-car budget for one. That changed once the air-cooled era visibly ended with the 996's water-cooled switch in 1998 — the 993 became, retroactively, the last one, and values have more than tripled since the mid-2000s on that scarcity alone. A meaningful share still gets driven hard by owners who bought in before the boom; the newer money arriving at today's prices tends to treat matching-numbers paperwork as seriously as the drive.