When trying to find something to pawn, many people ask about tablets, but sometimes they are broken. Find out with pawn shops will still take broken tablets!
Electronics is one of those items that most pawn shops out there just can’t get enough of.
To be honest with you, almost every pawn shop that I have ever worked with will do just about anything they can to get their hands on good electronics.
On the list of electronics that pawn shops typically love to take are things like laptops, TVs, video game systems, and you guessed it… tablets.
Of course, the better the tablet (or more precisely the higher the demand for the tablet) the more eager a pawn shop will be to make a loan on one or buy it. More on this later.
That having been said, the real question that we are getting after today is if a pawn shop will make a loan on, or buy, a broken tablet.
That question is much more interesting, and unfortunately, it’s not super easy to answer.
I will however do my best to cover all potential sides to the query at hand and by the end, you should know if your tablet is one that a pawn shop would consider taking in or not.
In some cases, pawn shops will buy or accept a broken tablet for loan, but not always.
What Does “Broken” Mean Exactly?
The first question that we need to address when trying to come up with an answer for you is what do you mean by broken?
There’s a lot of things on tablets that can go wrong, and while some of them will rule out a pawn shop taking it, others can be worked with.
So let’s try to break this down, one by one.
Password Locked
The first “Problem” that people often have with tablets is that they are password locked.
In the event of Android and some iPad tablets, that can mean just a simple pin or number combination that is required to use the tablet.
Most of the time pawn shops will avoid these problems as they often indicate that the tablets was stolen. However, if you can verify ownership (with an original receipt for instance), sometimes a pawn shop may still take it in.
iCloud Locked
In the event of an iCloud locked iPad, most pawn shop will avoid these altogether as they are most commonly stolen.
There’s not much you can do about this as the pawn shop won’t want to deal with broken items and above and beyond that, the value of an iCloud locked iPad is often very little unless it is the newest model.
Cracked Screen
The next major issue with tablets that often goes wrong is that they have a cracked screen.
Just having a cracked screen can mean many different things.
For instance, you may just have a minor chip in the corner, which isn’t a big deal most of the time. Many pawn shops will still work with these.
Other times your entire screen can be shattered, or ‘Spider Webbed’ and unlike screens with just a minor chip, most pawn shops will not work with a tablet that has this kind of damage unless they specialize in rebuilding or repairing them regularly.
Bad Charging Port
Again, this is a problem that most pawn shops just won’t work with unless they have some kind of special operation that is well suited for rebuilding and repairing tablets with defects.
Typically speaking, if your tablet won’t charge or transfer data by the charging port, you can pretty much bet that a pawn shop won’t want to take it in.
Bad LCD Display
Some tablets get funny colorations on their displays (red finger print looking areas for instance) and sometimes a pawn shop will work with these if the damage isn’t too bad, even if they don’t specialize in repairing electronics.
Just keep in mind however that a pawn shop will almost certainly offer you less for yours if it shows this kind of defect.
Non-Working Buttons
Most tablets have exterior buttons, such as a home button, volume buttons, maybe even a lock button of some sort.
In some rare cases, pawn shops will still work with these even if they might not normally, but understand that this is a highly specialized situation that can vary greatly.
In most cases, a pawn broker may not even notice that the tablet has this defect, but it is still best to declare it upfront so as not to appear dishonest should they discover it during their evaluation.
Damaged Bodies
In some cases, the plastic or aluminum body of a tablet can become dented, scratched, or cracked.
The determining factor here for pawn shops will often be the extent of the damage done to the body.
A few dings and dents typically isn’t a big deal (although it will hurt your offer), but serious cracking with entire missing sections of the body will almost always get the tablet turned down by the pawn shop.
Some Advice Form The Nerd
If you want an extra piece of advice from me, it would be to make sure that you take in any other parts of accessories with the tablet with you when you go to the pawn shop.
Just because a tablet is damaged doesn’t mean that a pawn shop will automatically turn it away, but it will often mean that you are offered less for it.
To help compensate for that, if you can take in things like extra cords, chargers, keyboards, or a great case (like an Otterbox for example), you can sometimes offset some of the loss that you might normally experience when taking in something with significant damage.
