Quality of refurbs better?

[Muncher]

Just thinking out loud here, but doesn't it seem like computers bought from apple's refurb store are less prone to problems out of the box than when bought normally? We always see posts about people getting their "brand new imac" and now it has problems, but not so much with refurbs. Like I said before, just sort of thinking aloud.

 

[tuxtpenguin]

Refurbs go through a process to check them out, so they "should" have had all defects noticed and fixed. At least, one would hope.

 

[mtk75]

Just a guess, but I think a refurb would be using components that have come out of machines that were returned for reasons unrelated to the component itself. This means that those parts have already been through an initial period of use.

Typical electronics have a "bathtub" distribution of failures. In other words, there is a relatively high "infant" mortality where components die within the first x hours of use. Then there is a long number of hours that the components don't show many failures at all, followed by a rapid growth in failures after y hours. I think the typical chip will have an x of 30 to 90 days in standard use, and a y of ~5-6 years of standard use.

Applying this to the refurb above, the components will probably be past their initial higher failure rate portion of the curve, and just starting the long period of low failure rates. You would expect a system made up of components like this to have less issues.

One more factor is probably increased scrutiny before using the part in a new system. They would need to test the component well enough to ensure that it was not the problem the original unit was returned for, thus it has perhaps gone through more testing than the average part off the assembly line.

-Matt