They quoted me $296 for a Macbook Pro. I sent it in and awaited the audit results.
They wrote me back claiming the iSight camera doesn't function and they were therefor dropping the condition of my laptop from "Good" to "Poor" and reducing the quote by $40 to $256 (I looked on eBay and a replacement part is $4: a 10X markup).
Problem is, the Macbook was at the Apple Store a week before I sent it off to PowerON and had a full diagnostics test. No issues with the camera. And of course the camera worked just fine when I owned it.
Furthermore, the photo the PowerON technician sent as "proof" of the faulty camera (a photo of the laptop screen) had an OS X Snow Leopard desktop wallpaper. But I sent them a laptop with a fresh install of OS X Lion; a completely different desktop wallpaper. Their photo was also low-res and poor quality, with no date or time conveniently featured.
I was preparing a reply to PowerON about these points when I stumbled onto this thread and began reading horror stories about people receiving drastically reduced quotes. Or even worse, broken devices returned or parts swapped out with dents, etc. So I figured I was "getting off good" with just a $40 difference in my quote...So I cut my loses and just kept my mouth shut and took the PowerON offer.
Total scam. I'm partly to blame for doing zero research on the company prior to sending my Macbook off. I just assumed that they were 100% legit since Apple.com links directly to them for their recycling program.
If I were to do it over, I would just go with Gazelle.com which offers the same amount for my laptop.
PowerON? More like PowerOFF.