Lets ignore the environmental debate on this topic, because if you don’t buy it, someone else will. There are several reasons why refurbished equipment makes sense, lets deal with them in order of importance and then we have a real disastrous, heavy warning at the end.

Where does all the kit come from?

There are two main sources, some companies like to change their IT every so often, like 18 months. Why? If you are the leading edge of technology you don’t want your guys to be seen using out of date equipment. I has to be the best for some companies. Other sources are short term contracts. If you want a building site for a project you hire a on on site portacabin with the latest kit and when the projects over back it all goes to be refurbished 6-12months later. 

Up to 80% Saving against new

You have a simple monetary choice when buying, you buy the best or the cheapest, Buying refurbished lets you buy the best there was 18 months ago at the cheapest price now. The only penalty is its no brand new. Buying the cheapest now will get you rubbish performance, low usable life and poor reliability. You can get a £1,200 Lenovo for around £400. That’s like getting a 2 year old Jaguar for £8K instead of £32K. The current Apple 27″ 5K retina display system is £1,999 new, you can save £700 by buying last years model or nearly £1000 for the year before.

Better reliability?

On the word of reliability there is a school of thought that says buying refurbished means better reliability as the problem new units have been removed. We don’t really agree with that as IT equipment is pretty reliable but the first six months is when the failure happens so you will definitely miss that problem area.

Not the latest model

No it isn’t, but its not far off. The ideal processor for business in either an Apple or PC is the Core i5 by Intel, thankfully AMD, virtually the only competition, seems to have disappeared from the market and that is an old discussion. The i5 has been around for six years, there have been four generations since it was introduced in 2009. The difference between the latest and the previous generation is not that great and the one before was also marginal. Only the first generation is now really out of date. So either Generation 2,3 and 4 will give you a good all round business system. Its like getting a faster instant coffee- not that important but better tahn starting with just beans if you are in a hurry.

Warranty

Usually the machines are still in warranty but all the Lenovo’s and Apples we sell come with a 12 month parts and labour cover. We sell the extended warranties but its your choice, the machines are at their peak of reliability but there is always one, and you might v=be the unlucky one. Two years cover for an Apple iMac is £175 but it could cost you that just for a faulty keyboard. With a laptop that’s a motherboard replacement.

What does refurbished mean?

Everything or nothing. Some people just wipe a machine and do a re-install and call it a refurbishment. We clean inside and out, replace anything that looks suspect so it doesn’t break down in use and then we grade them A as good as new, B slight imperfections, or C, scratches and marks. The batteries are tested to hold a charge for 24 hours.

Now the heavy warnings

1. Don’t buy a brand that doesn’t have a good spares reputation, this includes Dell and Sony.
2. We have seen refurbished machines that are insurance write offs’ from things like water damage which are coaxed back to life with a 3 month warranty, only they fail and screw up your data down the line.
3. Beware the non-official refurbish-er, all our systems are refurbished by either a Microsoft or Apple refurbish-er. We have seen pirated software on these and you are liable. They also install software that wont run correctly on that model.
4. The parts might not be genuine. We have seen some Apple systems with 8Gb of RAM which was not the right type and had also failed as it was cheap. The right RAM worked faster but cost more.
5. Beware of preloaded malware. We had a system in for repair which was bought from a shop in Colchester. whoever “refurbished” this loaded a key logger in a hidden file that sent data to a website. It’s easy for that to copy the credit card details that are typed in and send them off to be used by criminals, it was such a localised program that the AV solutions would not find it but we susoect it had been going on for years so we dread to think what they had collected. We always check our systems and load  trial AV and anti malware.

We only supply Lenovo and Apple as refurbished equipment

Everyone who works at CMX has a used Lenovo laptop, even me, and my wife has just moved from a desktop machine to a used Lenovo laptop to replace the tablet that she has decided to abandon. The Lenovo I am after is the one with an i7 and touchscreen with handwriting recognition at £900 its better than new at £2000. I don’t really need it but you may have noticed I have a PhD and a requirement of a doctorate is that you develop atrocious unreadable handwriting and this model can read it better than I can!