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It's a case by case basis in my experience.
That... makes sense. At least with open-box laptops it's easy to test them in-store before buying (ppl on Reddit report being allowed to do so). I am a bit worried about liability going that route... say I inspect a laptop and it is defective, I don't want them to try and blame me saying "well it worked fine when Geek Squad powered it on and let it sit at the desktop for ten seconds with zero load on the CPU & GPU, the artifacting didn't start until this customer ran that scary Furmark app on it so it must be her fault!"
That's the plan, if they don't let me inspect & test it in-store I'll probably just buy new. Even a brief stress test with some portable software on a USB should sniff out any obvious issues.
I’ve never had them let me open it in store from their inventory even if it was sold open box. I was told I can test it at home. You may have a hard time trying to get them to let you run software on it off a usb stick before you buy it FYI. I would be extremely surprised. They will likely tell you to buy it and return it if you’re not happy.
Likely also depends on the employee helping you. I have worked best buy before and I would open things up for customers and give them the whole show to make them happy/return buyers.
I wanted to see whether people would respond with "you have a high risk of getting a defective machine, don't waste your time" or "it will probably be ok, worth the risk". Seems more the latter, which is the info I was looking for.
Yea. As long as they still honor the full warranty I don't see much risk in keeping it.
When I bought my open box Razer blade, I mentioned that I wanted to verify that the specs are valid since it was a customer return (ram amount and hard drive capacity is right, among other things). I also wanted to check out the condition (damaged screws...). I was able to do all that with the preface that I was going to buy it if it all checks out.
You can negotiate at best buy?
I worked at best buy/geek squad 7+ years ago. Back then at least, I don't know if its the same now, open box was almost entirely brand new items that were returned because people realized they didn't need or really want it. They would come with the same warranty as new items still. Test it if you can, but I never saw any risk in picking one up.
The more expensive your purchase, the more haggling power you have. Try and find the store manager and get him involved in your entire purchase. Once they are ringing you up, that manager will usually be inclined to bend backwards when it comes to adding more on. Especially if what you are adding is an item they have had in store for a long time.
