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I bought 18 broken Xboxes – Can I Fix Them and Make Money?

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Eighteen dead Xboxes just showed up in one liquidation pallet, and someone has to figure out which ones are worth saving.

TronicsFix, the repair channel that’s built its following on tearing apart consoles other shops won’t touch, picked up a full salvage lot of 18 broken Xbox One consoles — a mix of Xbox One S and Xbox One X units — straight from a liquidation company. The premise is simple and a little reckless: buy the dead hardware in bulk, diagnose every unit, fix what can be fixed, and see whether the math actually works out once the repairs are done.

• The lot consists of 18 non-functional Xbox One consoles, primarily Xbox One S and Xbox One X models, purchased in bulk from a liquidation company.
• Common faults diagnosed across the batch include power supply failures, damaged HDMI ports, faulty optical disc drives, defective hard drives, and corrupted system software.
• Some units suffer severe motherboard or APU damage — a failure point historically unfixable in the shop, which turns those consoles into total losses or donors for spare parts.

Sorting the Salvage Lot

Before any soldering iron comes out, every console in the batch has to be triaged. TronicsFix works through the pile console by console, powering each one up where possible and running through a checklist to figure out which failures are routine and which ones are going to eat the profit margin. With 18 units on the bench, that sorting process alone determines whether this ends up being a smart flip or an expensive lesson in liquidation hardware.

Because Xbox One S and Xbox One X consoles share a lot of the same internal architecture, the failure patterns repeat across the lot. That’s good news for anyone trying to fix hardware at scale — once you’ve solved one power supply fault, you’ve effectively solved several.

The Repairable Failures

The bulk of the video is spent on faults that fall squarely into “fixable” territory. Power supply breakdowns show up repeatedly across the batch, along with damaged HDMI ports — a chronic weak point on the Xbox One line thanks to how easily that port gets stressed by cable strain. Faulty optical disc drives and defective hard drives round out the rest of the routine work, and system software corruption gets cleared up through standard troubleshooting rather than any hardware swap.

None of these are exotic repairs on their own. What makes the video worth watching is seeing them stacked back to back across 18 units, with TronicsFix walking through the diagnostic logic for each fault as it comes up on the bench.

The Faults That Can’t Be Fixed

Not every console in the lot gets a happy ending. Severe motherboard or APU damage is the recurring problem that TronicsFix flags as historically unfixable in the shop — there’s no reliable repair path for a fried APU on this hardware, which means those units either become total write-offs or get cannibalized for parts to keep other consoles alive.

Motherboard or APU damage remains historically unfixable in the shop — turning those units into total losses or spare-parts donors.

That distinction matters for the bottom line. A power supply or HDMI port repair costs time and a cheap part. A dead APU costs an entire console, and the only return on it is whatever components can be pulled and reused elsewhere in the batch.

Running the Numbers

The video closes on the financial tally — weighing what it cost to buy the 18-console liquidation lot against what the repaired units are actually worth once fixed. That’s the real test of the whole experiment: bulk salvage buys only make sense if enough of the batch clears the bar, since the dead-APU losses have to be absorbed by the units that come back to life. It’s the same calculation anyone chasing refurbished Xbox One S and Xbox One X stock has to run before they commit to a pallet sight unseen.

For viewers following the channel’s broader console coverage, it’s a useful companion piece to anything on current-gen Xbox hardware — including breakdowns like The Truth About Xbox Series X — since it shows exactly what happens to last-gen units once trade-ins and liquidation pallets take over. Anyone tracking where Microsoft’s hardware messaging has gone since can also check Xbox Boss Reacts to PS5 Event for the console-side context.