have you ever bought refurbished electronics?

Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy all have good deals on refurbished or certified refurbished as they call it electronics.

have you ever had any luck with any of it?
TV or Tablet or Laptop?

guaranteed to get a lemon if you buy one or legit?

a reply to: TinySickTears

Generally legit, in my opinion.

I'd say failure rates are roughly the same as "new." I've had a lot of luck with refurbished tools.

That said, I feel like the more complicated the device, the less likely I am to buy refurb.

a reply to: TinySickTears

In my personal experience I would say it's a crapshoot. Some of it got used hard. Some of it was actually repaired defective items. Some of it is simply returned because the customer didn't like the color or something like that. Also some people when faced with a short term project will purchase items never meaning to actually keep them. If it's really cheap and you can buy a extended warranty I would go that route myself.

I bought a refurbished iPhone off the Walmart website one time and it came on time and basically was a brand new phone. The only bad thing I guess was I ordered it 'rose gold' and they gave me a gray one... Bastards.

Worked in industrial electronics for a while and a well respected programmer, referring to industrial electronics, told me that " if a component didn't fail within the first 30 days it would most likely last a very long time". I can't compare it to commercial electronics though. Never bought referb.

Edit: I don't buy extended warranties and haven't been burned yet...

a reply to: TinySickTears

Ex standard office PC still working after 10-15 years here. Dell Optiplex tower. Cheap, cheerful and uh...champion. For the price.

ETA In the Netherlands you can buy refurbished ex government or other corporate setting PCs easily but they have all been tested and come with a 3 month guarantee second-hand. $100-$200 dollars for a completely functional PC. They ain't the newest but if they work, they work for quite a while.

I work at a company that does reverse logistics on electronics. We take returns from places and process them to resell. We test everything and clean and repackage and the quality of a lot of the returns are pretty good usually, the rest get sold as scrap basically.

It's definitely hit or miss but I will say woot has been great for quality products. My rule is if it is bought refurbished, it must have at least a year's warranty.

I bought my smart television refurbished a customer return from a online shop in the UK , It came like new with a year guarantee and i saved a couple of hundred on it , but with E-bay you get a guarantee if buying over long distances to return the product i would give a 8/10 score

I bought a 58 inch refurb tv from Walmart 3 years ago, still going strong.
Never had a problem at all.

a reply to: TinySickTears

I've had good luck with refurbished stuff. Had a tv that I got in 2003 that we ended up giving away in 2010. Had a refurb computer that lasted 6 years. On a refurb computer right now

We usually get used laptops from my daughter, she owns a business where she does lots of computer work. She buys some refurbished computers, they all seemed to be holding up. She stocks a lot of fans and stuff and orders parts as she needs them and fixes them. She has about ten computer systems in her office. Her computer she had to buy special and put a water cooler on it because she has five screens on her computer and I think it is a dual system with multiple video cards. That is what she does for a living, she teaches workers how to do the job over the computer and has about twenty employees, most of who work from home.

a reply to: TinySickTears

I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro through Amazon. It has run like a champ for a few years now. Nice thing about Amazon is the return policy if you are unhappy at all.

a reply to: TinySickTears

I've purchased a number of refurbished rackmount servers and never had a problem with them.

IT people always tell me to order a refurb from the Dell outlet store. My friend who works for Dell tells me the same. I have a Samsung surround sound system that was a refurb. NO problems that I know of but I still don't know how to get my surround sound to work with streaming.

Anyone know how?

Manufactured refurbished items are typically great values. The items often undergo more rigorous testing than "new" items to ensure quality. Seller refurbished items are much riskier, in my opinion. I buy about 75% of my electronics refurbished if at all possible. The ONLY issue i have EVER had has been some MINOR cosmetic flaws- light scuffing or shallow scratches. 9 times out of 10 the item seems to be "new", just cost me less to purchase. Some items, such as HDD's might be sold as refurbished when a more accurate description would be "used". Try to read reviews on an item if purchasing online.

I'd say, go for it!

a reply to: TinySickTears

Well, the real problem is, the word "refurbished". Refurbished doesn't mean what most people think it does, and particularly with electronics like computers, laptops and the like it can actually mean the exact opposite.

Is refurbished stuff guaranteed to be a lemon? Absolutely not, but the problem is, you don't know where it came from. The vast majority of "refurbished" computers come from leased fleets. The leases expire and companies bid out a new lease with a different vendor. These devices then get returned to the leasing companies who dump them back into the retail market via auctions. With many of them the only 'refurbishment' which happens is someone turns them on to see if they power up. If so, they get a "REFURBISHED" tag stuck on them and get sold at a discount. It might be a great unit, or it might not, you just don't know.

I think we all have this image in our minds (I know I used to) that a 'refurbished' device goes back to the manufacturer where they take it apart, replace defective equipment and then subject it to a rigorous Quality Control inspection by the OEM before it gets the "refurbished" sticker on it. Not so in many cases. In fact, most if not all devices never go back to the OEM. And, if you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. OEM's aren't set up to deal with these kinds of things. That's not what they do, and the additional overhead to get into this market segment would add cost to all their front line "Factory New" equipment, for marginal (at best) profit margin.

A person might do okay on a desktop PC (but I'm looking at a dead "refurb" right now in the office not three feet from me...it lasted about 2 months). However, I wouldn't touch something like a refurbished laptop or tablet with a 10' foot pole! They live in a far too dynamic environment and are next to impossible to truly 'repair'.

"Does it power on?? Okay, ship it!"

a reply to: seattlerat

That is totally NOT true!

Some might, but most do not...and virtually zero ever go back to the OEM, not computers anyway.

ETA - Think about it for a minute. New motherboards and chipsets come out practically every month. It would take STAGGERING sums of capital $$$$ to stay on top of just the testing equipment alone required to "rigorously test" electronics...only to sell them at deep discounts where the margins are cents on the dollar(???) No way!

So what is this rigorous testing then???

Let's say you're in the refurbishing business (the middle guy between the leasing company and the retailer), and let's say you get 10,000 PC's a month back on various leases. Are you going to even have the time to power up each and every one these devices and leave them powered up long enough to get warm (when failures occur)??? Then you're going to break out your multi-million dollar diagnostic gear and run that processor through every single one of the billions of permutations of things a PC does in a day, and analyze and record every single process, then compare these values to the billions of OEM established values for the same printed circuit or chipset??? Then you're gong to move on to device #2. No freaking way are you going do this!! There's not enough money on planet Earth to cover the expenses this would take. It would take every single person in India and China combined, and even then you couldn't stay on top of it.

Nope, if the green light comes on when they hit the power button...it ships.

Scrounger that I am, I have bought most of my electronics used, and mostly, I did well. I'm doing this post on a mechanical keyboard I bought at a garage sale for two bucks and a computer I bought from an electronics recycler for $45. It is well known that electronics have a HUGE depreciation in value from the MSRP. Yes, I've bought some DOA units as well.

I've never bought a computer brand new, only refurbed. And only via Best Buy thus far (never given me any reason to go elsewhere)

Our current desktop and laptop -- a 2000 series laptop, and a Pavilion...P-7 series? Been a long time since I actually looked at the series -- were both 2012 models, refurbed and bought in 2013. Both are workhorses, the desktop has not needed anything other than upgraded RAM to keep up with the times, and the only things in my laptop that have needed replaced are the fan and the keyboard (that was a DIY thing on my part, less than $20 worth of parts) I maxed out the RAM as soon as I got it.
I want to say these were $400 and $300 respectively, they were at least $100-$150 less than brand new.

Prior to that, we had an eMachine desktop and an Acer laptop, both refurbished & from Best Buy, They lasted about....4 years before a lightning strike hit a little too close to the house and fried both of them. Hence the HPs. I don't even remember what those 2 cost, but it wasn't a whole hell of a lot compared to brand new.

I had a few others prior, but I can't remember the makes anymore other than a Dell. Which was a 2002 that I bought in 2005, and amazingly, still works. Well, it's not useful for so much as browsing, but it does still turn on and you can still use the programs, lol.

I can only upgrade my laptop's guts so much, the RAM's already maxed. I'm going to have to replace it eventually, the GPU isn't going to be able to keep handling programs, games & videos forever.
The desktop, on the other hand, is still running maxed games and high rez videos off just the graphics chip. We haven't even bothered with a stand alone graphics card yet. We're looking at upgrading to one next year, and it should get us many more years of use out of it.

Suffice it to say, I want an HP Omen eventually, but damn sure am not paying full price for it, not for what Omens cost. I can buy last years model used & at a discount just fine, it works just the same.