Should You Buy Refurbished Electronics?

Is buying refurbished electronics a great way to save money, or a risky gamble on a mistreated gadget? Techquickie explains.





Intro Theme: Showdown by F.O.O.L from Monstercat - Best of 2016

[Suuhls]

Refurbished SSD, like new, only 743TB written

[Prisoner-jfvi]

Bought a hp computer over ten years ago and everyone at the time told me it was not a smart idea. Price was good and I bought it. The computer still works to this day.

[camilogt]

i bought a dell monitor refurbished about 10 years ago, and it stills works, totally worth it

[gabrielfraser]

When my school upgraded their computer lab, they went with refurbished Dells, ended up costing a fraction of the retail price. They bought 25 for every 20 they needed, since they didn't have a lot of faith in them, but they performed brilliantly.

[ShaneRob]

I work at a Goodwill where my job is refurbishing computers. I definitely approve of buying refurbished with the caveat being that you should know what you are getting before you purchase it. We try to make it very clear if there are any issues and what they are, and we only sell computers with issues if it isn't something that affects it actually being able to work (e.g. a USB port not working).

[mcwix]

1:23= “kinda like a stray dog” (shows picture of pig)

[meowdacat]

when buying refurbished ask if the fans have been cleaned and thermal paste changed as alot of the time places dont.

[hkoizumi]

I've been dealing with technologies for over 37 years of my adult life and I quickly learned that refurbished items are good or if not better than new items. This video pretty much validated my experience thus far. My family thinks I'm cheap or stupid for buying refurbished items over new but it is they that was blinded by stigma of the wording "new".

[DEMENTO]

I bought an Asus GTX 1070 Strix OC on amazon reconditioned products (idk if it's the same, that's how is called here), and here (in spain) it's obligatory per law to have a 2 year warranty on anything any company sells.
I paid like 100 euros less, (especially because the non stop raising prices back then) and works perfect, actually I think it was a consumer's return, because the box had a detached sticker of a mail company, and it was like opened but with all the accesories and the bags resealed, it was like the best buy ever

[kikook]

In my experience, the refurbished is still covered by manufacturers warranty. At the very least, the things I've gotten refurbished has. If that's the case with most items, there's not much risk of buying it.

[JimGriffOne]

I bought a new laptop. It died. I didn't have any recourse other than a £250 motherboard replacement. A few months later I found out there was a common problem that killed my motherboard and many people claimed against the company. I had already binned my laptop.

My brother bought a new car. It was freshly built and factory new with 14 miles on the clock. The radiator blew within 4 days and he had to take it back for warranty repairs.

My car, I bought second hand, knowing full well that I'd most likely need to do a head gasket repair on it as it was a common failure point. This made the car cheaper to buy, but it was cheap for me to fix to a better standard using higher quality parts from China (who took over the car company and actually improved upon the British engineering). I fixed the car and it's running so much better than when I bought it, and the price of the car is appreciating as other people are losing theirs to the same head gasket issue.

Moral of the story: Buy what you KNOW is going to work, or what you KNOW you can fix to a standard you can either sell for the same/higher price or just use for yourself. Never buy new and expect it to work flawlessly because it has this "NEWWWW" label on it. New means that it's at the beginning of the *Failure bell curve* and that it hasn't gone past the peak, and that none of the common failure points have been identified or fixed yet.

[leonelleyva]

0:16 guessing you had 59 fps instead of 60

[Celician]

Bought a Refurb Corsair RM750x PSU recently because I saw the growing number of people complaining the fan never comes on. Not a big deal when you realize the fan is a thermo-sensing fan that only comes on when needed, which some people may not like that function and return them with absolutely nothing wrong with them. It also comes with the 2 year warranty, so kudo's to Corsair!

[blauw]

Once bought a refurbished smartphone on which they forgot to install the Playstore at first

[monkeywithocd]

I bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T430 from Amazon, and though the reviews are kinda all over the place, the only problems I had were that there was slight cosmetic damage on the top of it, there was so much bloatware that it ran slower than the Windows 95 computer I grew up with (but this was probably how it came originally :rolleyes:), and the third "problem" was something that I was considering doing anyway: Though the laptop came from when Windows 7 was out, they said that it would have 10 installed, but mine came with 7. Almost immediately I remembered how much better 7 was overall and so didn't really pester them to give me a key, since unlike my main computer I didn't have anything tieing me to using 10. Still, I got it for far less than I could have gotten another laptop with flimsy build quality and lower specs that would break apart after a couple years. Seriously, I hate this modern trend of trying to make laptops (and electronics in general) as thin as possible: I will take my old laptop that I repeatedly dropped and it still worked just fine over these laptops that you condemn to a quick death by just putting in a backpack.

[ZeusTheIrritable]

I bought a "Grade A" refurbished laptop from Best Buy for almost half-price. That was almost three years ago and it's still chugging along just fine as my daughter's gaming PC.

[tylerbjorkstrand]

1:18 "It's sort of like a stray Dog". *Shows a pic of a pig*

[MrJay]

I buy only manufacturer refurbished if it's not from the manufacturer forget it and if there is no warranty options forget it.

[PanzerIV]

I love refurbished products, you often save a lot for ridiculous things like damaged packaging which will go in the garbage anyway. Often it is 99% new, mostly on Amazon and anyway as long as I still have my 1 year warranty then I don't care. Open Box is usually pretty good too and even better. Monitors can be a bit tricky cause of people returning for dead pixel usually but if you can return it also at no fee then it's worth taking the risk. I would never get a used HDD though.

[tomaikenhead]

“that must be italian” 1:01
excellent semi-obscure reference to a stylized prize lamp