By Eric Griffith, Published in PCMagazine 2007
A lot of companies make both notebooks and desktops. Alas, few do both well. For example, Lenovo/IBM scores terribly with desktops yet does very well with laptops. Apple is the exception, as usual. Scores for the Cupertino, California-based company in both categories are outstanding.
Apple's overall notebook scores are, in fact, identical to last year's, with the exception that it has fallen one-tenth of a point (to 8.4 out of 10) in tech support. This year enough readers volunteered info to give Apple a score for the quality of its repairs; at 8.1, it's still eight-tenths of a point better than the nearest repair score. And readers scored Mac notebooks a full 100 percent for ease of setup. Simply amazing.
Where does that leave Windows notebooks? All the vendors garner what we consider "very good" overall scores, ranging from 7.0 (Averatec) up to 8.4 (Fujitsu). With the exception of Fujitsu, Gateway, and HP (the latter two with 7.8), all Windows notebook manufacturers' overall scores are down. Averatec fell the most, from 7.5 to 7.0; Acer did only a bit better, going from 7.9 to 7.5. There were no new vendors added to the notebook list this year. With mostly lower individual scores, the overall average score for Windows notebooks dropped to 7.8 from 8.0 in 2006. Clearly, readers are less happy this year with their computers.
Particularly worth mentioning is Dell. The company unquestionably leads in market share among our readers (see Inside Dell). Yet Dell never quite makes it as a leader in our Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey. This may be due to its extreme scores-in the wrong direction: It received a worse-than-average software reliability score (68 percent) and a significantly worse percentage of notebooks needing tech support (37 percent), for example.
Apple and Fujitsu both manage to keep their reliability scores from last year intact (9.2 and 8.6, respectively), but after those two, everyone takes a dip, with the exception of Gateway, holding onto 8.0.
The sharply lower scores for Acer and Averatec continue to indicate severe problems. Averatec first appeared in the survey as recently as 2005. The company's very respectable scores at the time have dropped in the two successive years. Reliability for Averatec systems is a worse-than-average 7.3 (down from its 2005 high of 8.4); things are only slightly better, at 7.7, for Acer systems less than a year old.
Acer's modest 7.8 score for reliability may seem surprising, given that it has the lowest percentage of units needing repair (15 percent), a full point less than Apple's. But Acer has other problems, like only 58 percent resolution in calls to tech support on issues with its notebooks.-next: Likelihood of Recommending
Remember what we said about recommending Apple Macintosh desktops? Read it again, but substitute the word notebook where appropriate. The numbers are eerily similar. Apple notebook users would recommend another Macintosh to people 9.4 times out of 10-and an astonishing 9.5 times if their Macs are less than a year old.
On average, new Windows notebooks are more likely to get a recommendation, with a score of 8, than all notebooks under four years old, which managed only a 7.7. It would have been a 7.9, but Averatec's significantly worse-than-average 6.4 recommendation rating dragged the figure down. The company received the same poor showing for recommendations under home notebooks. Averatec didn't even make the list for notebooks less than a year old.
Newer computers should get more and more reliable. And for the most part, that's what's happening: The average number of repairs for notebooks less than a year old was down one percent from last year (in this case, lower is better) but up individually for Apple, Dell, and HP.
Gateway managed a respectable drop from 15 to 12 percent on newer systems needing repairs. In fact, Gateway improved its overall numbers for support, repairs, and the likelihood of recommendation, all notable in an otherwise down year. But almost all vendors (Apple is the exception) saw a substantial drop in their scores when it came to newer laptops. In the area of technical support for new systems, Toshiba fell by eight-tenths to a woeful 6.2; HP fell seven-tenths to 6.3.
We had enough responses from readers to give repair scores on new notebooks to only Dell and HP (we encountered the same issue last year). No surprise, both were down, Dell to a 6.8 and HP to a 5.9. Both vendors were at the high end when it came to percentage of new notebooks that required a tech support call (35 and 36 percent, respectively). Only Sony was worse, at 37 percent.
Readers went after HP in particular, assigning low scores for tech-support issues such as how fast they connected, providers' expertise, and the amount of time it took to rectify a problem. The company took a beating when readers were asked if they were inconvenienced when new notebooks needed support, with a 5.1 out of 10.