We may have reported earlier that Apple might finally face the headwind from the economic downturn, but that’s not everything there’s to this story. Recent data suggests – once again – that Apple customers are very, very satisfied with their Apple purchases. In other words, most current Apple customers are very likely to buy Apple again. Interestingly, ASUS and Acer did very well in the survey as well.
The data comes from ChangeWave research, which might not be as comprehensive as that from the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, but it does focus on “senior technology and business executives in leading companies of select industries”, which implies a ore demanding sample group.
In any case, the figures are pretty clear. Among customers who purchased a Mac over the past 90 days, 81% say they are “very satisfied”, followed by 67% for ASUS, and 61% for Acer (both with a strong netbook presence). Dell scores 55%, and Lenovo 50%. The report has other interesting data, but I want to focus on customer satisfaction for a moment.
Customer satisfaction is a very difficult and complicated concept, determined by so many factors that it’s hard to explain properly. Contrary to popular belief, being a satisfied customer does not mean “high quality”. More accurately, it signifies to what extent a product has fulfilled the expectations of said customer.
Let’s break out the car analogies. People who spend 50000 EUR on an Alfa 159 will have different expectations than people spending the same amount of money on an Audi A4. Alfa Romeo owners will accept more failures and breakage form their 159 than Audi buyers will tolerate from their A4. The reason for this is differences in expectations: an Audi doesn’t break. With an Alfa, it’s part of the charm (even though it’s not nearly as bad anymore as it used to be).
What this means is that similar products at the same price points will be treated differently, leading to a different sense of customer satisfaction. Said Audi showing minor defects within the first 10000km will lead to a bigger blow to customer satisfaction than that Alfa doing so. And that’s just one of the many factors.
In the end though, the goal of a company is to make a product that satisfies customers. As has been shown time and again, Apple does a good job of doing so, and it turns out that Acer and ASUS are good at it too.
Given the luck I’ve had, or lack of it, with most Acer systems I’ve had to work with, and more often than not, repair, I’m surprised they rate so high in customer satisfaction. I’ve had so many issues with Acer laptops of various types that I, personally, am extremely hesitant to buy from them again. Never mind the awful job they did on my brothers laptop they were supposed to fix, I had to reload Windows for him after that because they messed up the job so badly.
Have I just had bad luck, or has anyone else had this experience with Acer as well? I’d buy from Dell before I bought from Acer again, and that’s saying something in my case.
I agree about Asus and Apple, however. I’ve had very good experiences with both.
I am suprised by Acer too. But I have one of their laptops, midrange Aspire, and it`s rock solid for nearly 4 years, working in dirty, dusty environments (used even for location shooting). Battery died, but it`s manufactured by Sony. My GF has another model of Acer and it`s working flawless as well. On the other hand, my friends with Asuses, Fujitsu/Siemens and even Apples have had all sorts of problems with their machines. It all trickles down to luck, I suppose
I’m a bit surprised too. I’m on my third Aspire One. The first died (failed to boot) after about 6 weeks; the second after 4 months. Fortunately, there was nothing critical on the HDD either time. Kudos to Microcenter (from whom I purchased the AA1); both times they just exchanged the dead AA1 for a brand new unit. That being said, I really do like my AA1; fore me it’s a worthy notebook replacement.
Hmm, you’re on your third Aspire One in approximately five months, and its a worthy notebook replacement? I’m guessing you mean the functionality of it, and I’d have to agree, but for me that would kind of sour the taste after the second return. I’d be hesitant to trust it after that, I guess.
I wouldn’t buy an Aspire One in any case, but that’s down to personal taste, I don’t like how annoying they made something so simple as a ram upgrade. But that is purely personal taste. I will say they have some of the nicest keyboards I’ve seen on a netbook, though the NC10 comes close. But the nice keyboard with an 8.9-inch form factor is a plus for it, no denying that no matter what I think of Acer products in general.
Ya, I used to work for an ISP… a customer kept getting a ‘no dialtone’ error when trying to access the Internet, because their modem was jacked. They called Acer about it, who told the customer that the problem was on our end.
That was several years ago though, so I can only conclude they have improved since then.
And I’m not. Their hardware provides good balance on performance/quality/cost. I have my 2nd Acer laptop on my desk right now and never had nay problems. In previous laptop the quality of plastic elements was pretty poor. However, it has improved a lot since then, and now I am really satisfied even by that.
Both laptops came with Linux pre-installed, at lower price than Windows machines, so it’s a big plus for me.
According to an old friend on mine who gets to play with most new kit (he writes the web content for a group of large PC retailers) Acer have really raised their game lately.
This is not to contradict anyone mentioning problems here – there’s always the risk of getting a netbook that was put together at 4pm on a Friday :o)
From their monitors to their laptops, their products almost always have terrible reviews. I realize that reviews don’t necessarily reflect the truth about each individual product, I think when you look at the whole body of reviews for Acer products it’s hard to believe the findings.
I second that. My ASUS mobo works real nice and the 5 Apples in my family works as they should. But both my sister’s and my wife’s Acer Laptops have had their batteries completely fail and generally been working in a substandard way.
I have only purchased on item from Acer and it was in the last year. It was a desktop and I have had no issues with it yet. It runs Fedora and blazingly fast speeds, runs decently quiet and was much cheaper than other makers. I was worried about it being that I had heard negative things about Acer in the past, but it seems that it is actually in the past.
Apple keeps rating the Highest in Customer Satisfaction because not only they high quality products, but they also take the time to make the process of buying and getting started with those products as easy as possible.
Now go ahead and talk about the Apple tax and how much more they charge, but as other websites and blogs have researched, if you compare the exact apple products with other 3rd party products, the prices are not huge difference.
Love it or hate it, they are doing a fabolous job at executing products and thus receiving highest customer satisfaction and at same time boosting sales in this weak economy.
And NO, I am not a Apple fanboy. I just speak the truths.
-Eagle101
Apple also rates highest up there because no Mac user that is unsatisfied (with rare exception) ever admits it. They will defend their purchase to the death, and if its a 1.0 release form apple and is having issues (track pad on new Mac Book pro’s) they will make excuses on Apple’s behalf.
With that said, Apple also DOES in fact make a high quality product and I have been very happy with most of my Apple releated purchases. But Apple’s “typical” (and i do stress typical) users would never admit that Apple has any faults, let alone unhappiness with their products. after all they have to appease Steve and make sacrafices to the volcano god to ensure it does not errupt…. wait, i think i got a little off topic, eh.
I was going to mention that but you’ve beat me to it. Sometimes when you’ve made a purchase, it’s rather more expensive than anything else, you’ve been told that it is the height of fashion and build quality and you find out that it really isn’t, you start making excuses for it. Not that many people admit to being suckered in and then disappointed and they cultivate the image further. You then have a core bunch of people who will never admit to there being problems.
All the Macs I have used over the last few years have been cheap, poorly put together PCs that have just about ran. Running hot, battery trouble and some dodgy displays that have had seen little stress. How else can they make their margins and convince you to fork out for Apple Care? I rate the pretty excellent HP laptops I’ve had over the years higher.
I fully agree, and I am kinda surprised that you get away with it with such a high moderation score
. In the past I have bought a Mac Mini (Intel Core 2 Duo) and a MacBook (Intel Core 2 Duo). Aside from the fact that the MacBook is terribly extensive (and the fact that it is expensive makes you want to buy two additional years of warranty).
OS X is a subpar UNIX operating system. It does not have a decent package manager, and applications run slower than on other Unices (especially JDK 1.6 has been quite slow for me). Of course, there is MacPorts and Fink. But Fink packages were often old, and MacPorts packages often did not build. Coming from Linux and BSD systems, it was a huge step back. Of course, I am probably not the average GUI user.
Then, stuff breaks every few releases. First my printer stopped working on my Mini somewhere around 10.5.2. Even fresh installs, etc wouldn’t help. The first print was ok, after that it would print garbage. My MacBook used to authenticate acceptably with eduroam, but around 10.5.3 stuff broke, and I could only authenticate with our local eduroam network out of 50 times. My Ubuntu-loving friends had no problem connecting to the network at all. Since 10.5.6 my OS X started locking up for a period of time one per hour of so. By now I have reinstalled my Mac Mini and am going to use it as a low-power Linux home server. I gave my MacBook to my significant other and bought an off-the shelf HP business notebook and installed Linux. All the small gotchas annoyed me so much that I have no OS X machines anymore. And I did try, for one year and two months.
Aside the quirks, it breathes of restrictiveness everywhere. For instance, I have an iPod touch, I want to sync it at my girlfriend’s machine, and iTunes does not want to sync anything until I erase all my music. Likewise for her Nano on my machine. I can buy some application to work around this anti-feature. But frankly, I don’t want to, it’s my media player, so I decide what to put on it or with what computers I want to synchronize, not Apple.
Are you kidding? Mac users has to be the whiniest and pickiest bunch there is (myself included).
“Are you kidding? Mac users has to be the whiniest and pickiest bunch there is (myself included).”
Their are worse. try going to an AIX conference and getting into a “who’s unix is better” argument with some of the devs. Now that is the worst (also, most fun argument ever), fortunatly though there are only a handfull of the Unix elite though compaired to how many Apple users there are.
Also I believe you qualify under my “Typical” clause
And so is ASUS and Acer, it would seem.
If you say so.
dying batteries
exploding batteries
cracking cases
bended cases
substandart displays
poisonous fumes out of your mac
disassambling mainboards
bad cooling design
overheating laptops
pick your favourite
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/30/
Firstly either learn to spell, get a spelling checker, or maybe use an OS that does an inline spell check.
That aside, name me a computer company that hasn’t had these issues. I used to trade in 2nd hand computers and stopped buying non-Apple laptops because upward of 90% of the non-Apple machines would have cracked cases, hinges falling off, major cooling problems, and to top it all off they had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Then there were the desktops with doors missing, cracked bezels, broken CD mechanisms, RUSTING cases.
In 28 years of using Apple products I have owned Apple II’s (Plus, e and GS), a Mac 128 (which STILL runs), SE30, LC, 580, 5260, numerous G3 iMacs (in an office environment), iMac G4, iMac G5, 3 varieties of iBooks and still have 2 x Minis (1 x G4, 1 x Intel), an original 17″ PowerBook and an Intel iMac. These computers have been used by me, my family and my staff. I live in a climate that can be extremely hot and humid, yet in those 28 years I have had 1 hard drive failure in the 580 (fixed under a recall program), 1 hard drive failure in the 5260 (fixed under warranty – both 580 and 5260 were Seagate hard drives), a motherboard in the iMac G4 (caused by a zap up the modem port in an electrical storm) and a PSU in the iMac G5 that failed within the Early Failure timeframe so they just sent me a new machine. The 17″ PowerBook has no onboard sound because when it was 6 months old an employee tripped over the power lead and pulled it off a table, it landed on the corner of the case on a concrete floor with no damage other than the onboard sound. It does get a little hot but a $20 cooling base has sorted that issue, and it is not as bad as a Toshiba I used a number of years ago in a consulting role that actually blistered my leg.
During that 28 years I have also had numerous branded and generic PC systems as both servers and workstations, two of them are in use in my house / office now. We have regular PSU issues (and we have tried cheap PSU’s right though to $250 units with little difference), have replaced numerous ethernet cards because they just die and have stopped buying internal CD drives for them because we know that if they aren’t used for a few months they too just die – again over the years we have tried numerous brands to no avail.
Even accounting for the cost of the repairs we would have spent more per system in dollar outlay on the Macs than the PC’s, BUT the cost of downtime alone would have covered the gap 10 fold.
Presently we remotely support a number of Windows and Linux networks, have a web design company and run a few sizeable eCommerce sites, all from Macs. The PC’s we have are there to either test web compatibility with Internet Exploder or for my son to play games on. So please, have your little geeky hissy fit about batteries and whatnot, and the rest of us who actually use computers for real world applications where uptime and total cost of ownership are important will get on with using our “just keep working” Apples.
That’s the whole point, sir.
A true premium company doesn’t have these issues at all.
I have very expensive speakers here, 35 years old, hand-made in The Netherlands. The rubber cone rings have degraded, and they need to be replaced (but hey, 35yrs old), but they are STILL working. I could have them fixed for, say, 50 EUR, and I could enjoy them for another 35 years (I actually decided to buy new ones from another premium company, British this time – fit better with my apartment).
THAT is premium. I don’t know of ANY personal computer company that delivers such quality. And sure as hell Apple isn’t one f them, seeing the long list of established issues they had.
It’s funny how people say Apple is a premium company, but then when people point them towards the proven list of systematic cock-ups, it’s suddenly all “yes but other manufacturers have those problems too!”
Which raises the question – what, then makes Apple premium?!?
Oh grow another brain cell Thom – really – you are telling me that company that made those speakers has never had a product that has had an issue. You actually quoted in there that these speakers are degrading. I have a Mac 128 that still works as good as the day it was made; should we use that as the guide and say “see, Apple stuff NEVER breaks and they NEVER make a product that has problems.” Of course not, that would be as moronic as using one set of speakers to quote the quality of product made by a company.
Does your keyboard have a garbage generator attached to it or does this stuff honestly come out of your head?
You really need to grow up…
name me one that has them at the same scale as apple
but to give you some names: ibm, hp, panasonic, fujitsu
actually i have never seen/heard of a smelling pc besides macs
or laptops that get so hot that people say it hurts them
or cases that break by just looking at them
by the way: don’t complain about other peoples spelling
it gives the impression that you have run out of arguments
IBM and HP laptops made up a good percentage of the ex-government stuff that I wouldn’t buy because cases were falling apart with hinges protruding through plastic etc. Fujitsu, well their Air Conditioners are good, but I’ve had numerous Fujitsu hard drive failures over the years. Only experience with Panasonic was with some monitors, they were OK, no major issues that I can recall, picture quality wasn’t anything to write home about.
You mean like the Toshiba that blistered my leg or the Dell, Sony, HP and yes Apple laptops that were catching fire? Or maybe the run of generic PSUs of which we ended up replacing around 40 because they were toasting themselves and causing the evacuation of a whole school when they set off the smoke alarms, with the smell remaining in rooms for days later? See above regarding laptop cases.
Your ability to correctly spell what you are writing, and actually use the correct word (Thom were the sample group looking for a truckload of bauxite or should it have been “awe”?), and structure it in an intelligible manner, helps gives credence to what you write. And its “other people’s”, see that little apostrophe in there signifies ownership, without the apostrophe it would suggest plural, and “people” is already a plural noun. And I have no shortage of arguments because I have many years of life experience to support them, in contrast I see nothing to support your claims that these other companies don’t have any issues at all with their products. And if we’re talking about track records with faulty products should we bring up Microsoft, or does your field of vision end at the hardware?
Apple doesn’t have a perfect track record when it comes to accepting faults and fixing them. Similarly neither do many brands synonymous with quality. Apple do however do a much better job than most. As recently as six months ago Apple were replacing the motherboards of eMacs that hadn’t even failed because they had been identified as likely to fail due to a bad component run. They worked with the schools in question to rotate the machines during holiday time so there would be little or no interruption to their use in the classrooms. Those machines are well out of warranty but that replacement program is valid for the life of the computer. Quality goes further than the components that make up the piece of hardware.
It is totally unreasonable to expect that any company in today’s fast paced IT industry will be able to test every product extensively in every environment and still get it to market in an acceptable timeframe. Thom compares Apple to his hand made speakers then goes on to complain that they don’t bring out new product fast enough. You can’t have it both ways. The quality of any product in any industry is a comparative thing, and Apple is in the mass produced computer industry. In this industry, compared to the majority of their competitors, they deliver a quality product top to bottom.
I have, the toshiba one’s used to get so hot you couldn’t have them on your lap, didn’t help they put the fans on the underneath of the notebook.
HP 17″ laptop’s get as hot as hell aswell.
The problems in the list affected all laptop manufacturers, dell sony have all had problems with batteries.
As for apple users little shoddy products through, as mentioned before me, apple users are the most picky when it comes to their computers. A tiny scratch or any mark out of place will usually cause the apple user to send it back to apple.
Ive brought a total of three apple computers, powerbook in 2005, macbook in 2006 and a imac in 2007. All work flawlessly i haven’t had a problem with any.
The mac’s all get heavy use and in particular my macbook which i use every day at work, so it’s always moved about and is not treated in a precious way.
My friends with apple equipment also have had no trouble with them, apart from one, the laptop would switch itself off. He sent it off and got a replacement laptop within a week, on the standard warranty and not apple care.
“That aside, name me a computer company that hasn’t had these issues.”
I am going to go for the obscure (and list a company that I and maybe 1 other person her have ever heard of).
Tadpole Systems. http://www.tadpole.com/
Best quality laptop’s on the planet. I love my SPARC powered laptop
.
also: http://www.gd-itronix.com/ (who I believe now owns Tadpole, but I could be mistaken). http://www.gd-itronix.com/index.cfm?page=Products:GD6000 love it, highest quality I have seen/dropped from a second story house.
Edited 2009-02-19 23:43 UTC
You may be right. But they have a good replace policy. My sister change her damage Ipod in Apple Argentina, when the equipment was bought in Canada and didn’t have a ticket to prove it because it was a gift.
I am a satisfied apple user. But I pick crackinng cases and heating laptops from the list. I had to put a tape on the case to prevent the cracks from getting bigger. And I bought a $80 wireless keyboard and a $50 mouse to not touch any key or the trackpad on my macbook. It gets so hot. But I have to say, I find heat as common problem in most of the laptops I used. Even the recent acer machine I bought which has 22W AMD processor becomes hot.
End of rant
A bit OT, but if your Macbook is heating up like that you should probably have it looked at. That is not normal, they do run a bit warm but nothing like that, and generally they get a bit warm on the bottom but not near the keyboard. On mine, non-aluminum white 2.4ghz, the keyboard and trackpad are only slightly warmer than room temperature, though the bottom warms my lap up nicely but doesn’t burn it. It doesn’t run as coolas my iBook G4 did, now that laptop hardly ever got warm at all, but it doesn’t get anywhere near hot enough to burn. I’d either take it in for service or, if you prefer, open it up and have a look at the fans, as something is definitely going wrong with it.
I’ve got no idea why you were modded down. I agree with you. I also don’t see why you received so many dissenting comments either.
My experience has been as pleasant as you described, and then some. In addition to your comment, I would add that the online support has been fantastic.
If my mac has been trouble free, then how would I know about the online support, you ask? Well, it hasn’t been trouble free. I had an issue with updates.
I’m not going to say that Apple is perfect. But, they are so far ahead to what I’m used to, it makes them easy to defend.
I’ve had a lot of Apple “firsts” recently. I visited my first Apple store about 6-8 weeks ago. I just bought my first Apple (< 1 month). And, I bought an iPhone at Christmas. So, I’m new to Apple products and service. And, I can say beyond all shadow of a doubt that Apple rolls out the red carpet for their customers. They treat you like they actually appreciate your business.
You do pay a premium for Apple products, but you get what you pay for in service before and after the sale, software and hardware.
My wife has a blackberry and my kid has the iPhone. There is absolutely no comparison. Do you pay more for the iPhone? Yep. Is it worth it? Yep. Does Apple do everything right? Nope. I wish my macbook pro had a control key on the right, a home key, an end key and an insert key. Will I get used to the keyboard? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that they aren’t perfect. But, they are far superior in so many ways that I choose to not dwell on the negative. I’ll bet I find work arounds for my keyboard issues.
Oh. And, Apple comes with all of my GNU apps: bash, grep, perl, python, sed, awk, screen, ssh, nfs, automount, X ….. all on outstanding hardware
They market really, really well. I’ve had my fair share of issues with Apple hardware before (I purchased a powerbook years ago and it ‘went bad’ multiple times) but their support was good. I spoke to a person who spoke my language in my own country and, even though I had to wait a week to get it fixed, somehow I felt better about the whole ordeal versus a lot of other makers. Do I run Apple products? No. I do respect how they treat (or at least treated) their customers.
Not trying to divert from the topic, but Audi holds the dubious honor of having one of the worst reliability records in the car industry. I know exceptions to the rule, but mostly that, exceptions. A better example would be, say, a Bentley, or if you want something more accessible, a Lexus or Mercedes
I wonder why the big hit in customer satisfaction from Lenovo? At our workplace we use only Lenovo laptops and they are ugly but the quality is unmatched.
Yer I know, it’s amazing. Mercedes (you see cheaper and cheaper plastics used for one), Volkswagen and BMW have also managed to pull off something similar – stack them high and sell them expensive and no one really wants to admit that they’ve bought crap, it’s exorbitantly expensive to service and they’re getting screwed. They become willing participants in the impression of paying for German ‘quality’ for the sake of pride.
It’s not exclusively a German phenomenon, but German car firms in particular have done well off the back of the image. I’m not quite so sure it’s going to continue to be successful in the current climate though.
Edited 2009-02-19 21:47 UTC
Asus has been making Apples for years.
I’ve had bad service on more than one occasion! This past November, I had to send them the motherboard. They sent it back to the wrong address, not once, but twice. On the second time, it was accepted by someone at the address. They had to send me another motherboard, which I got this time, but it still has the same problem. I tried to contact live tech support, but no one was available. I used there system to send them the problem referencing the 2 RMA numbers I got, this was over 48 hours ago. There system says they will write to me in the next 48 hours. If someone calls this great service, then should I shoot myself?
Agree 1000%. Bought an EeePC 901 3 months ago. Keyboard quit working so got an RMA and sent it in for repair. The didn’t send me any confirmation emails when the repair was complete ( why they can’t send out status updates is beyond me ) and when I went and checked on it I find out that it had been shipped to Kansas ( not where I live ) and had been there for days. Took over a week and a half for me to get the unit back after that and it was sent back to me without the battery. They overnighted me a battery which was good but shouldn’t have been necessary. After 1 day of use the hard drives stopped being seen by the bios so the unit had to go back to the RMA department. It has been a over a week and after calling in twice to get a status update ( the first time I hung up after 25 minutes of holding ) I find that it won’t arrive until the 24th. I will never buy nor recommend an Asus product.
Edited 2009-02-20 02:07 UTC
I’ve never had a Dell that made it through it’s warranty.
The two Macs in my house have never had a problem.
My iBook had to be sent for service twice in the first three month. My Dell is been working flawlessly for the past 4 years. As did the Dell I had before it.
Anecdotal evidence is great, isn’t it.
It’s kinda funny, isn’t it.
I have a very horrible experience with Toshiba.
They were first unable to fix my laptop which cost 3000$ (yes its a gaming laptop x205) then they fixed it but after 45 days even though I dropped the latop to a service center!
Their web site support is hidden and their XP drivers are not posted.
Lenovo on contrary had the best experience for me they have sent me 2x the WNIC for 3000 series laptop and it has arrived in just 2 days via fast shipment, also no waiting on the Telphone and no arguments at all.
Hp are horrible but not as horrible as Toshiba in support.
Acer, Fujitsu and Sony are quite OK but not v good
Apple are Excellent but they are a rip off and their systems are so locked and not available for repairs and they keep changing frequently with the worst model numbering scheme.
Gateway, emachine and other disasters are unacceptable.
e-Machines seriously does suck (too bad Gateway bought them), but I have to wonder about Gateway itself. I’ve heard bad things about them the last several years from various random people, although I’ve never had a problem with them myself.
I’ve only ever owned Gateways so far (if you don’t count the Apple IIe…), and they all worked well; my current system is an aging 2001-era Gateway with a P4, never had any problems with it (other than getting stuck with expensive RD-RAM). Still runs pretty good today, though not quite as good since software has become more bloated and I can’t get more RAM yet to offset the bloat.
To be fair though, I haven’t got another computer since this one, so I have no idea how their systems are today. I also don’t know how their support is these days, since I just don’t need it any more, but it used to be excellent as well. But that was between (approx.) 1997 and 2002. I have heard that they’ve had some serious financial trouble the last several years… maybe that could be it.
Well, my Apple track record is rather… Depressing.
http://cogscanthink.blogsome.com/2009/02/10/apple-hardware/
Then again, the only Dell I’ve ever owned started to fall apart after a few months.
The best machines I own are my Sun Ultra 5, my Aspire One, and my two self-built machines.
On computer websites you can never go wrong with a car analogy.
It’s kind of like a toyota, everybody has one.
Out of the Mac users I know (seven), four are very happy and have not complained (my brother has not complained despite numerous hardware failures), one barely uses it, one is used to Linux and is not happy, and another is decidedly unhappy but does not dare to buy anything other than Apple because he hates Microsoft too much and Linux is too hard.
Then why did they buy a Mac? The Linux dude can install a distro on it, anyway.
Um… I think he needs to grow up.
A lot of folks are using the automobile analogy, but vehicles run better when serviced regularly and generally looked after. So do PCs, imho. Regular de-dusting and cleaning, re-greasing cpus, replacing poor fans, renewing fuses, running off clean current – all this helps. As does buying quality only when it comes to be base components such as psu (especially), mobo and ram. Crap current = crapped out PC soon enough.
I’ve always had plenty of life from all the hardware I’ve bought with the exception of Nvidia graphics cards. I had an Apple printer that was still going 100 per cent after eight years and my Toshiba laptop is still working fine after 6-7 years. A Dell PC lasted five years of complete thrashing, as did a self-build based on an Asus e7205 board, Crucial ram and an Enermax PSU. I only got rid of the Dell and the Asus because they were too slow. They still worked fine.
I don’t really rate these consumer surveys. They may tell us a bit about how folks felt on the day but not about how they may feel tomorrow. You can learn just as much by walking around your local shopping centre or mall and taking a close look at who is buying what, which stores are busy, which look ones look scuzzy or have a poorly chosen selection of products, etc.
I’ve had several bad experiences with Apple. Among them are were a beige G3 that was DOA and had to be replaced, a G4 Cube that also shipped DOA and had to be replaced, and a G4 TiBook that shipped DOA and had to be replaced (noticing a pattern?). That same TiBook also suffered, over it’s two-year life, two motherboard failures and two DVD drive failures.
My Asus laptop, after a year, is fine; it took my HP laptop before it 18 months to experience a part failure. My two non-apple self-assembled towers are fine. I do not trust Apple.
“I’ve had several bad experiences with Apple. Among them are were a beige G3 that was DOA and had to be replaced, a G4 Cube that also shipped DOA and had to be replaced, and a G4 TiBook that shipped DOA and had to be replaced”
…wow. have you ever thought that maybe your neighbors just come over and throw whatever pachage is sitting on your door step against a wall a few times before you get it? I mean, you must have the worst luck ever to get 3 for 3 DOA. But seriously you might want to ask your neighbors, “Hey guys, have you ever seen a delivery from apple in front of my door and thought it was a good idea to say, oh i don’t know, use it as a hockey puck?” If they look like they are trying not to laugh I would pursue is further.
Actually, the OP has a point. I had a dispute with Apple in the mid 1990s involving a no-good-boyo Mac 7600 which Apple seemed reluctant to repair even though I’d paid extra for the top level of Applecare.
Things got really bad when an Apple engineer visited, rebuilt the machine and “forgot” to put back in 320 megs of ram, then worth hundreds of bucks. A very stiff letter from a solicitor and a question about whether Apple would like the police involved soon sorted that out. The 7600 was fixed very quickly after that.
Needless to say I would never touch Apple products with a mile-long pole again no matter how reliable they may be. Sometimes, the way to deal with crappy hardware is to find a good lawyer and get those writs prepared. Most large outfits really don’t want that kind of hassle. At some point, it becomes cheaper for them to do what you’ve paid them to.
Toshiba suck, I used to own a satellite 1400, and I kept breaking things on it, also I’ve had a lot of people complain to me about them. Asus I love, I bought an F9S laptop and I’ve never been happier. As always though you need to test different laptops before you buy to get the right size/configuration. Too many people rush into IT purchases without looking at the details.
…the only thing I don’t like about Asus notebooks is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off the cooling fan, or at least a way to control it manually so it’s set at a constant speed.
We had an Acer laptop — an expensive one, about 1700 euros — that died in two years, one month. It was already flakey before that, prone to restarting because of overheating, but Acer’s service telephone line was basically unreachable. And then the backlight died. I blogged about it at the time: http://rempt.xs4all.nl/fading/index.cgi/hardware/acer.html. But then, my experience with Dell was worse: http://rempt.xs4all.nl/fading/index.cgi/hardware/score.html.
Mind you, my 17″ powerbook, while not dead yet, was delivered with a long hair between the backlight and the pixel plane. Quite irritating. And if you touch the lid just wrong, suddenly the backlight drops and you get weird flame patters on the screen. Not to mention the odd crashes in the dock, safari or just of the os itself.
But my lenovo X61t — I love it!
Everyone seems to focus on the defect. Is it off topic? It is also quite hard to argue on each brand rate of failure with personal data. But on the other hand, service quality is base on personal experience and perception of those who answered.
If I have to answer this survey, I will probably rank Apple high, because when I had trouble with my MBP, the service was excellent. Far superior to how it was with my HP or Lenovo.
I had a problem with my battery.
1. I get to the apple store,
2. Talk to a genius (or whatever), he listens and boots up my MBP with his iPod to run a check.
3. He goes in the back and return with a new battery, change it and it was done.
For the same problem on my HP.
1. I get to futureshop (Bestbuy) where it was bough (not HP store)
2. Fight with the guys because he said I was the reason of the failure.
3. Need to send the laptop to be check by HP (do they really do it, never know)
4. Call several times over the month to have a status
5. They reset my system in French (I speak French yes, but I use it en English and it was sent in English)
6. They explain why I was lucky to have it under warranty.
Is that make my MBP less prone to problem, maybe not, does it make my experience better, yes.