How Bad is a Refurbished iPhone...? By Unbox Therapy

Welcome to part two of buying the best-selling smartphone on Amazon, I still can't believe which model it was Amazon best-selling, smartphones, and I'm going to go for unlocked interesting. This is the Apple iPhone, 864 gigabytes, space gray, fully unlocked renewed. It is my first experience with a renewed apple product, a renewed product from Amazon, and I think it's my first experience with any renewed smartphone. I'm trying to remember right now renewed is another word for refurbished. I guess at some point people stopped liking the word refurbished, and they went with renewed uh, either way, it's obviously a very popular choice for customers. So I am curious, you're, probably curious: what do you get if you recall from the last video when we purchased this? There were some reviews that were less than stellar.

There were some reviews. That said, just don't do it. There are some reviews that said faulty product, those were old reviews, but then we found a recent one which said the worst refurbished renewed device. I've ever bought January, 18 2020 in space gray, the purchaser cw with pictures and the device looked terrible. So, of course, you know we had to order it up and see what type of experience we're going to have.

After all, it is the best-selling smartphone on all amazon. com. Here it is. This is what you will receive a plain white box at this point. You would not know that was an apple product, it's far from an apple product, unboxing experience, but this thing is under 200, 179 bucks.

If you look over here, you see Apple iPhone, 8 GSM, unlocked space, gray, renew! That's your only indication. It is a super plain white box. Ah, okay, all right bubble wrap is involved, certainly no original packaging. If you decide to return your device for personal security, follow the instructions below to remove your iCloud failure. To do so will delay your refund.

Make sure you turn off, find my iPhone found in settings. Delete the device from your Apple account look at where this came from. Okay west end enterprises very interesting when we were reading some of these reviews and people were saying that the devices could not be activated because there were issues with carriers and apple saying the device was stolen. So this might be something that happens when a customer returns a device that it doesn't get fully reset, and it still pops up and find my iPhone for the original owner and creating problems for the next user. You can see how that would be an issue, and that's probably why we have this particular instruction in here.

If we did happen to return this power, brick is not original at all. So that's something you may not have expected. You might have expected to see an original apple power, brick or at least one that looked closer. This one, on the other hand, is a fatter power, brick, but it does give you two USB ports, a 2.1 amp and a 1 amp USB port. So that's, I guess better, but this is a generic looking brick, and it is still your what is it 0.5 amp DC 5 volts, it's a slow charger right, but then again, if you purchase this device, you would have had the apple 5 watt charger. So, okay, fine, the cable, has a Foxconn logo on it.

Oh, this is a more exciting unboxing experience than I had originally imagined straight from Foxconn. I don't think I've ever had a cable straight from Foxconn. Of course, Foxconn the company manufactures apple products for apple, but once it leaves the factory, it would normally have an Apple logo on it, but this looks like an exact version of apple's cable, unlike the power brick. So that's weird: if you got the power cable from Foxconn, why don't you get the power brick as well? You're already dealing with Foxconn you're already ordering from Foxconn anyhow uh. This is a typical lightning to USB cable, which will plug into this power.

Brick straightforward stuff, not too much of a surprise. Now this is the phone. The most generic unboxing experience possible, you're trying to save some cash, though that's how you ended up here. Oh, this is weird program. T-Mobile DRP serial number listed here: Apple A1905, iPhone, 8, gray, 64 gigabytes, so I guess originally.

This was a T-Mobile device. It is currently being sold as unlocked at the moment. Double bubble, wrap and what kind of condition is ours going to be in? Oh, pretty good condition. Definitely good condition can I spot any wear and tear. I think there was a case on this at one point: there's some little specks of dust and lint and stuff inside the speaker grill.

I can see a little wear and tear on the charge port as well. Furthermore, I can see the remnants of an old fingerprint there on the fingerprint reader old, fingerprint remnants, so it is a weird thing. With the renewed title I mean it's basically a used phone now. Maybe if you got a refurbished device from apple directly, they would replace certain parts that showed more signs of having been used. But this one is obvious to me that it has been used.

Even if we look at the camera module here and that's super hard to see, but you can see some dust particles living around the camera module now. This happens if you use the device, and it's in out of your pocket, and you don't really care, because it's your own uh dust and grime, but it's something that you're going to have to prepare yourself for if you're purchasing a renewed device straight off Amazon, any scratches some tiny little corner scratches again, it's going to be super difficult to pick it up right down here in this corner, I spotted a couple. They are micro, though there tiny little scratches in the corner there. Hopefully you saw it look if I was in the market for an iPhone if I was in the market for a cheap iPhone. If I want to spend 179 on an iPhone.

Well, it's obvious where you end up. You know you're here on Amazon, and you may be concerned that you're going to get a piece of trash. This is not a piece of trash. It has some life left in it. I don't know if I would spend my 200 on a renewed, iPhone myself, but it's better than this person had in their review.

I mean look at these pictures. This person's is legit scratched up. It wasn't even cleaned off. You can see the marks from where the previous owner's case was, and this one has some worse off kind of dense and damage to the aluminum on the outside of the phone, which I don't seem to have here. Okay.

Well, obviously, we need to try and power it up and see what happens so is there going to be a charge? Definitely, oh, it does have a bit of a charge. We might not even need to plug it in with our third-party charger that was in the package here now. I would have thought they would have polished the uh fingerprint section there 20 battery, so not much battery in there, but, as you can see here we go now. I need to make sure I can actually get this thing activated. That's another thing, that's not in the package, no sim tool.

They assume that you've got a sim tool. It's something to consider all right. Let's see if touch ID is working as I touch the old fingerprint. Currently, oh man remember the touch ID days, wow yeah, it's its! I mean it's the same setup process on any of these, but all right we're in no sim card installed. So that's the next big test to make sure there's no weirdness as far as utilizing it on another network that said T-Mobile on a package.

Does that just mean it originated from T-Mobile? Whose phone is this anyway uh I'm going to get a sim tool because they don't give you one all right. Sim tools are not a huge problem around here. We have many sim tools. I don't care that they didn't include it, but just saying how much does this thing cost? I don't know, what's that worth? Oh, right here we go, ladies and gentlemen pop the sim tray. Okay.

Here we go slap that baby in and searching there. We go rogers, okay, legit unlocked device. Oh, you know what I kind of understand to a certain extent why people are buying this. It's so much like the current model, iPhone SE right. It is the pretty much the same phone minus the fact that it's nowhere near as fast or snappy or powerful, but in a weird way, apple, putting out the iPhone SE as a new product gave new life to the old product, because you could carry this around and kind of still feel relatively modern, even though the phone is quite old, well at least quite old in the terms of a channel like this, I know a lot of people carrying old devices in reality, you're.

What are you looking at you're? Looking at half the price, less than half the price to get an iPhone 8 compared to their new SE. So I understand that the processing power is not going to be there. The battery life is not going to be there, but for somebody who just knows they want a new apple phone, I don't know, maybe they have an iPhone 6 or something. I'm still surprised that it's the number one best-selling phone on Amazon, but it pretty much is as advertised all right now. What about the camera? I'm sure the camera's half the same, but the curious part for me is like is everything functioning correctly? So let me go ahead and snap a photo here.

The weird part is remembering what it's like to have one camera module I'm sitting here, thinking: okay, let's check out the no there's, no wide, there's no zoom! This is your standard shot. It's not half bad! Let me do a more detailed. Let me do some more detail on the dollar bill. Here we have good lighting lots of lighting. You know what it goes to show you even what they were doing back whenever the iPhone 8 came out.

It was already it was pretty good. It was pretty good half decent and there's no weird pixel stuff going on uh the sensor looks okay. I got no like weird dust or lens cracks or lens problems. As far as the camera is concerned, I'll do a selfie as well. Let's see if the front facing one is working properly.

It's doing some beauty stuff to me, but that's always what happens? They really try to fix me up, but beyond that uh okay, this one starts to look a little more dated. I suppose you start to look at some beard hairs over here, and it gets a bit soft on the zoom in on the crop you're not dealing with a tremendous number of megapixels. There we've seen huge improvements since this device on the front facing camera on other devices, but it's usable I mean you're living life you're existing and what about the speaker? Sometimes people get water and stuff trapped in this speaker, and it won't perform properly. So, let's test that out, oh yeah also accelerometer is working. Gyroscope accelerometer, I mean that's working, that's a working iPhone battery health! Here we go the measure of battery capacity relative to when it was new.

Lower capacity may result in fewer hours of usage between charges. As you can see here we have 91 percent of the original capacity. Can you pick that up on a display right there 91, that's, not bad, on a refurbished device? Now the question is: is that the original battery or a replacement battery? Because it would be hard to imagine that a person used this phone that little considering how old it is prior to be refurbished uh. Your battery is currently supporting normal peak performance. This is nice transparency from apple to put this in here and optimized battery charging is also enabled.

So you know what now I don't know, but some people might predict there's some sort of cherry-picking going on. Maybe somebody saw who it was, who is a no actually, that couldn't have happened, because I didn't even use my own name on the package, so it couldn't be a cherry-pick. Could I have gotten lucky with my particular model? No problems whatsoever, maybe, but I do believe that inside of Amazon's renewed program, I think they put some kind of warranty on there as well. So even for those people who are upset, I think they have some level of recourse. Let's see what it says: pre-owned product, not apple certified, has been professionally inspected, tested and cleaned by an Amazon, qualified supplier.

The product will have a battery which exceeds 80 capacity relative to new. So we did well on that 91 compared to 80 I'll, take it and the product is eligible for a replacement or refund within 90 days of receipt. If you are not satisfied, obviously, given stipulation on the paperwork saying if you do choose to do that, you got to completely remove your stuff uh from an Apple ID perspective. So anyway, it is a weird. It's a weird choice.

It's a whole new thing for me uh to investigate it's always the top tier premium, there's a lot of that on the channel, but it turns out there's a ton of people who are purchasing these refurbished, these renewed devices and also just interacting with older devices in general. So it's kind of a nice little refresh. For me, it's a little of exposure to a real world scenario. You ordered off Amazon. What really happens can you trust it, and it turns out that, even with the bad reviews, which tend to rise to the top, you have a lot of good ones too.21 000 ratings, four and a half stars on Amazon, a little of a warranty built in and in my case, a product that is essentially as advertised yeah. You know what it's not that bad! You.

Source : Unbox Therapy