Tosh on top for laptop reliability
Our survey says...
Which?, the UK consumer organisation, has ranked the UK's most reliable laptops.
Top of the reliability list is Sony and Toshiba with 93 per cent of Which? members surveyed saying their laptop had not needed repair. Fujitsu-Siemens got 91 per cent and Apple and Dell scored 87 per cent. Next were Acer and HP with 84 per cent, according to Which? members surveyed. The average score was 87 per cent.
Apple creamed the opposition for customer satisfaction with 93 per cent. Sony scored 77 per cent, Toshiba 76 per cent and Dell 72 per cent. HP got 70 per cent and Acer 68 per cent.
Asus's Eee PC scored highly for customer satisfaction, but not enough respondents had one for it to be included.
The average price of laptops is still falling - from £900 in 2006, £800 in 2007 to £750 in 2008. The survey is based on answers from 7,919 Which? members.
For desktop reliability Apple, Compaq and Dell all came top, followed by Acer, eMachines and Medion, then HP. Below average were Packard-Bell, Evesham and Mesh.
Half of those questioned got their machines from retailers and 84 per cent put John Lewis top of the satisfaction league, while PC World scored just 45 per cent. ®
COMMENTS
Drinking the Apple-hating kool-aid
Sometimes I wonder what it is about Apple that makes otherwise sensible people froth at the mouth. I've had to deal with a lot of laptops in my time, and my experiences line up fairly well with this survey. What makes Apple rank so high in satisfaction is the support experience when something does break. I've never had Apple support claim that an obvious hardware fault was a driver issue (HP), return a laptop with a wiped hard drive after being sent in for a non-drive failure (Dell, HP), or fail to fix a problem once they had taken it in for service (Dell). However, top marks go to Toshiba, where I have no idea how good their support is, because I've never had one of their machines fail.
Dell, on the other hand, makes some of the crappiest low-end "big brand" laptops I've ever had the misfortune to touch, and HP isn't far behind - except for HP, it's their entire line. I've never touched an Acer, and haven't worked with enough Sony machines to have formed an impression either way. As far as price goes, I'm not at all convinced that Apple is overpriced, since in order to get equivalent features on any other machines, you are usually within $100 - either way. Note that I'm deliberately leaving out the experience of actually USING the laptop - there are arguments to be made for both Windows and OS X, and I'm tired of hearing the screaming matches, much less participating in them.
You don't have to like Apple - the heavens know there are reasons not to - but this frothing hate comes across as either an ignorant mob or penis envy. It's not particularly attractive, and it's annoying as hell to listen to over and over and over again.
-Daniel
Toshiba's above in service for me...
Had a client that had a Toshiba laptop that had never been used (over 2 years old) and 2 months after they began hauling it around (would I have taken it to the beach?) it suffered a Total Death, in that it showed no life, battery status, and would not start. Upon calling Customer Service, and telling them it was not in warranty, and of course learning the true age of the machine, the tech told me a few tricks to try to wake up the machine just to be able to restore or repair what ever was wrong. First thing I tried worked, and they did not charge me a cent...that would have never happened if it had been a Gateway, HP/Compaq, Dell, or Sony. They want to have your credit Card information before they will even talk to you.
This may sell me on a Toshiba next time, as the others "OBVIOUSLY DO NOT WANT ANYTHING BUT MY MONEY!"
Bill, because he knows how to "NOT PROVIDE SUPPORT."
I wonder
how the number of hours of use for each laptop brand compares?
Does this include
The Tosh's with the self-destructing backlight inverters?
Ever tried to buy a Thinkpad?
IBM and now Levonos supply chain/marketing is heavily geared up twoards corporate customers. They dont have any meaningful consumer channels. You can buy a thinkpad online but without your corporate discount they end up shcokingly expensive.
I bought mine as a three year old second hand ex corporate machine - its probably the best computer I own in terms own (it does run unbuntu so it has an unfair advantage over the newer HP kit, and a Dell of the same vintage is starting to struggle.
My ASUS EEE is gradualy elbowing its way up to number one most used PC in the house. Fast bootup and genuine portability are a hard combination to beat;
