More or Less The Same
I've bought Apple new and refurbished. I think they are relatively the same and I'll tell you why.
Let's say you buy new, and something, anything goes wrong with it.
You send it to Apple, and bam, it comes back to you refurbished.
Once it has had service done, it IS refurbed, so by paying the extra $500 or whatever it is, you are gambling that they get it prefect the first time.
And of course, perhaps they will, but they don't have to give it to you perfect the first time.
They allow themselves a great deal of first-ship wiggle room with the warranty, and if you use that warranty ... then your new machine becomes one that has been handled by others and has been pried open in a shop.
And you know what?
You get no refund if your new machine is converted to a refurb two days after use.
If you want to pay the extra cash for the chance that you will have a non-serviced machine for the first year, it's not a bad thing. It is a gamble though.
If your machine needs service for any reason in that first year, you would simply have been better off buying refurbished from the outset because you got refurbished anyway ... but paid a great deal more for it.
This is kind of the way I look at buying a new and pristine machine. It only stays that way if NOTHING goes wrong with it for awhile.
It's actually MORE of a risk, because you are out more money on the mere possibility that it will never need to be shoved in a FedEx box and returned to a bunch of people in a tech shop who don't care about the thing nearly as much as you do.
Therefore, if refurb has something I want for a good price, I get it.
I recently got a 2.8Ghz Refurb Imac from Mapple, bought four gigs of ram Newegg, shoved it in the bottom, and now have a 4Gb machine with a Radeon 2600 that runs graphical circles around the 2.66, 9400M "new" machine that costs more.
Mapple wanted $300 more for an inferior machine (well, the ram cost me $70 so it was more like $230 more).
Say what you want about the Radeon 2600 Pro, but in my initial tests for far, it is about 40% faster than the 8600M GT DDR3 in my 17" Macbook Pro.
For about $1250, I basically have a machine that is pretty much the computationally and graphically equal (if not a bit better on the graphics) to the 2.93 Ghz machine going for $1800 on the Mapple site right now.
