Want to buy a refurb rMBP 15" - some questions

I want to buy a rMBP 15". Had a few questions.

- Is the rMBP refurb just as good as new? Do I have any quality or issues to worry about?

- I am concerned with the battery and SSD of the unit. Do they replace these 2 items whether they are defective or not? The reason I ask is that these 2 items degrade with use and I am worried with getting a heavily used SSD and battery. I am even more concerned since they are not removable.


Any help would be great. I am looking to buy a new laptop very soon. Thanks!

 

Refurbished Macs carry the same warranty as new and can be extended with AppleCare. They will essentially have new parts. The battery might have a few cycles on it, but nothing major.

A battery would be considered a "wear and tear" item and not be replaced unless it is defective. This is SOP for any laptop. IIRC, Apple charges a flat rate of $99 to replace the battery, which I don't think is unreasonable. As far as the SSD goes, unless you're writing dozens of gigabytes to the drive daily, you're not going to need to worry about wearing it out. Even cheap TLC SSDs, such as the Samsung 840 EVO have been known to survive writes in excess of 500 TB. The Mac uses MLC NAND, which should last even longer.

 

everything is attached to the logic board on the rMBP and they always toss in a new logic board before tossing it. (former apple retail store employee - family room specialist)

 

I'm not a former Apple store employee. I do however, work on Macs almost daily, and I have had lengthy technical discussions with the business teams at two different stores.

The 15" Retina battery is glued to the chassis (under the wrist/trackpad). It is not intended to be replaced alone. To do so, they have to replace the entire chassis. The saving grace is, if the laptop has *any* issue involving any part of the case, the whole thing gets replaced. Break a key mechanism? New battery. Trackpad issue? New battery. Break a hinge? New battery. (tho if you cause such damage, be aware it's disproportionately expensive to fix since.. new battery)

I am typing on a 15" Retina that had water damage that wrecked the trackpad, it was given to me as scrap. I actually *pried* the batteries off to replace it, and it was neither graceful nor pretty. But hey, free laptop.

The logic board *can* be migrated to a new chassis, but it's a lengthy and delicate process, and depending on how Apple plays it, they may not even bother. I've been told the depots often have chassis' with logic boards already in them of various spec, they can just put in your storage (see below) and your screen, re-flash the serial# if needed, and there ya go.

As for the flash storage (it's not technically an SSD in the terminology as it's not that sort of form factor), it's not permanently attached and is only held on with one screw. However, it's proprietary, and Apple has changed the connector at least once, so a replacement would need to be of the same model year or at least a compatible year. OWC sells flash storage for earlier models but it's kinda expensive.

Summary - A refurb has a -good- chance of having new batteries, and a lower chance of having new storage, unless the storage was the reason it got returned.

 

Generally, OEM-refurbished will be just as good as new. Usually, they're just cancelled orders, orders returned within the return period, or just older stock that needs to be moved.

That said, if that rMBP is from Apple's outlet, it should be just like a new rMBP, just cheaper. You probably don't get the shiny box, but that's about it as far as differences go.

 

I'm sure some parts can be recycled such as ssd but for them to go through the time to do all that doesn't make sense to me. Makes more sense and probably cheaper to just pop in another logic board in there than spend all the man hours to take everything apart and reassemble it to another board.