mariyaa

While I'm happy with my brand-new MacBook, my boyfriend -- a PC switcher -- just had a nasty experience with purchasing a refurbed MacBook Pro from the online Apple Store. I've never had a problem with an Apple refurb (I've owned several in the past 12 years), but his experience really gives me pause.

He purchased a refurbed 1st-gen MBP last week from the AS online. It arrived...bent in half. Apparently, it had the swelling battery issue, and the problem had literally bent the lower right-hand corner of the book upwards by about 15 degrees. When closed, the 'book looked like it was smiling, and on a flat surface, it rocked back and forth. How on earth something like that gets sent out as a refurb is beyond me. My suspicion was that it had gotten sent back originally for that problem, and just got dropped into another box and shipped back out.

I thought, "no", that couldn't be it. Until his replacement refurb arrived with a punishing case of flicker that rendered the display unusable. We brought that one into the local Apple Store here in Chitown, and they told us it was a faulty logic board that needed to be replaced.

Two broken refurbs in a row through the online AS is bad enough, but not outside of the realm of the acceptable. But two broken refurbs with problems so obvious that no refurb tech could possibly have missed them (an epileptic LCD and a 'book in the shape of a comma) is truly unbelievable.

Has anyone else had a similar recent experience with online AS refurbs? It made the two of us seriously doubt Apple's quality control, and worse, made my PC-switching boyfriend seriously doubt Apple, which is truly not how to win over new customers.