Refurbished iPhones: A Closer Look at the iPhone 8

When it comes to buying a new phone, many people opt for the latest and greatest model from Apple. However, for those who are on a budget or just want a more affordable option, refurbished or used iPhones can be a great alternative. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the iPhone 8, which is currently the number one best-selling phone on Amazon.

The Processing Power: Not as Much as You'd Think

One of the main concerns when buying a refurbished iPhone is that the processing power won't be as good as a new device. However, in reality, the difference may not be as noticeable as you think. When we compared the iPhone 8 to other devices on the market, we were surprised at how well it performed. The processor is still fast enough to handle most tasks, and the phone doesn't feel sluggish or slow.

Battery Life: Not as Good as New

Another area where refurbished iPhones may fall short is in battery life. The iPhone 8's battery is not as large as newer models, which means it won't last as long on a single charge. However, when we tested the phone, we were pleased to find that it still had plenty of juice left over after a full day of use. Of course, this may vary depending on your usage habits and any power-hungry apps you have installed.

The Camera: Still Decent, But Not as Good

When it comes to cameras, many people assume that refurbished iPhones will be half as good as new ones. However, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the iPhone 8's camera. The sensor is still capable of capturing great images, and the autofocus is fast and accurate. We did notice a slight decrease in image quality when zooming in on details, but overall, the camera is still more than sufficient for everyday use.

The Front-Facing Camera: Not as Impressive

One area where refurbished iPhones may fall short is in their front-facing cameras. When we took selfies with the iPhone 8, we noticed that the results were a bit softer and less detailed than those taken on newer devices. This is likely due to the fact that the camera sensor is not as advanced, but it's still usable for casual use.

The Speaker: Can Be Trapped by Water

Another issue that can affect refurbished iPhones is their speakers. Sometimes, water or other debris can get trapped in the speaker, which can cause it to malfunction or produce poor sound quality. When we tested the iPhone 8, we were pleased to find that this wasn't an issue – the speaker worked just fine.

Battery Health: Still Good

One of the benefits of buying refurbished iPhones is that they often come with a guarantee on their battery health. In our case, the iPhone 8 had an 91% capacity relative to its original state, which is still plenty good for everyday use. This is especially important for those who are concerned about their phone's battery life.

Amazon's Renewed Program: A Good Option

If you're considering buying a refurbished iPhone from Amazon, be sure to check out the renewed program. This service provides a warranty on the device and ensures that it has been professionally inspected and tested before being sold. We were pleased to find that our iPhone 8 had been thoroughly cleaned and checked for any issues, which gave us confidence in its performance.

Warranty and Return Policy: A Peace of Mind

One of the things that sets Amazon's renewed program apart is its comprehensive warranty and return policy. If you're not satisfied with your refurbished iPhone, you can return it within 90 days of receipt and receive a full refund or replacement. This gives you peace of mind in case something goes wrong with your device.

Conclusion

Refurbished iPhones may not be as flashy as their new counterparts, but they offer a great alternative for those on a budget. When we tested the iPhone 8, we were pleased to find that it performed well and still had plenty of life left in it. With its good camera, decent battery life, and comprehensive warranty, refurbished iPhones are definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to part two of buying the best-selling smartphone on amazon i still can't believe which model it was amazon best selling smart phones and i'm gonna 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 gonna have after all it is the best-selling smartphone on all of 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 volt 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 gonna 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 of the speaker grill i can see a little wear and tear on the charge port as well 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 it's 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 gonna 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 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 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 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 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 being 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 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 bit 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 bit 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 youwelcome to part two of buying the best-selling smartphone on amazon i still can't believe which model it was amazon best selling smart phones and i'm gonna 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 gonna have after all it is the best-selling smartphone on all of 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 volt 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 gonna 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 of the speaker grill i can see a little wear and tear on the charge port as well 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 it's 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 gonna 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 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 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 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 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 being 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 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 bit 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 bit 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\n"