I love getting Apple products refurbished, but I wish people on the internet wouldn't talk about it so much. I just bought a refurbished M1 Macbook Air, and had to settle for less RAM than I would have liked because my preferred configuration went out of stock while I was debating the purchase.
The experience is even better now than It used to be. I remember buying an iMac a long time ago and it came in an ugly brown box that screamed "you bought this at a discount". My recent Macbook Air just has a tiny "refurbished by Apple" note on what is otherwise normal retail packaging.
That was exactly my pain point back in 2007 when I wanted to get a specific configuration for the retina Macbook Pro.
That's why I built RefurbMe as a comparison and monitoring service :)
They were. I still have one that I bought when they were released. Well, just a bit after they were released. At WWDC that year, the SF Apple Store sold out of them before I could get there after the announcement.
Mine is still cranking, though it's recently relegated to couch duty as I use the 2019 iMac for WFH heavy lifting these days. I put a $29 upgraded WiFi module in it so that my watch will unlock it (and enables a bunch of other Bonjour functionality), but it otherwise just keeps humming along. I'm wondering if it isn't the computer I've kept and regularly used more than any other in the forty years since my first one.
Apple's own refurbs usually come with a box identical to the retail one except they don't have the graphics and they are just white and just have a wordmark, e.g. "MacBook Pro", in the center, so you can still use them for storage.
I've only ever brought one Apple product and it was a refurbished "blackbook" - really was a no brainer, I got the top of the line model for the price of a base model MacBook with no discernible difference in quality. That laptop lasted close to 10 years with a few battery replacements along the way
The experience is even better now than It used to be. I remember buying an iMac a long time ago and it came in an ugly brown box that screamed "you bought this at a discount". My recent Macbook Air just has a tiny "refurbished by Apple" note on what is otherwise normal retail packaging.