OK, my (refurbed) iMac 24" Alum/Extreme arrived saturday and I went over it with a fine tooth comb. Spent about an hour just looking at all surfaces before even powering it up. Then I powered it up and of course looked very closely at the screen, looking for problems like dead pixels, etc. After almost two hours of doing this... I finally started playing with it. ;D
Well, you could've fooled me
. If I didn't know better, I would've sworn this was fresh off the line. Many folks here have bought refurbs and the trick is to buy them direct from apple and not macmall or someplace like that. At macmall... all sales on refurbs are final in that you can't return them. Apple's refurbs are gone over by their own in-house techs and believe me, having dealt with Apple years ago on a marketing level... I know they put product satisfaction way above anything else. I've also been told that iMacs are randomly checked on assembly lines but refurbs are individually bench-checked. Maybe that's not true, but it sounds right because you can only run just so many kinds of tests on an assembly line before it gets cost-prohibitive.
Bottom line... mine appears to be perfect, and my buddy who came over to spend 2 hours showing me some of the ropes yesterday thought I bought new... it actually bothered him that we have identical machines an I saved about $300.00 by not buying at our local apple store!
The extra money went towards the memory upgrade (installed by me) and the Lacie drive, and yes... I have the same 1-yr warranty he has, and the option to buy apple care until that 365th day from registration.
Oh... did I mention that it's awesome?