Asus pulps Apple in hardware reliability survey

But the real success was Lenovo

By James Sherwood, 26th March 2009

Asus has stolen the top spot from Apple in a report that assesses the reliability of top PC manufacturer’s machines.

Put together by US PC repair and support firm Rescuecom, the league table was topped by Asus with a whopping 972 reliability points. Apple, now in second place, scored just 324 points.

Rescuecom’s scores are derived from 15,000 support calls made to the company during Q4 2008 and how those calls are divided among the major PC brands. It also takes into account the quarterly US market share of each PC supplier – figures Rescuecom takes from market watcher IDC.

For example, Asus had a 1.6 per cent Q4 market share, but only 0.2 per cent of calls to Rescuecom’s call centre were about Asus PCs. By contrast, Apple had a 6.8 per cent market share, but 2.1 per cent of call centre calls were about firm’s PCs.

In Rescuecom’s previous version of the report, an annual survey published back in December, Apple scored 700. Asus didn’t feature.

But the real winner is Lenovo, which scored 348 points this time around, just ahead of Apple's 324 points. Asus' score was massively boosted by a sudden surge in sales toward the end of the year, driven by sales of the Eee PC 1000 series, Rescuecom told Register Hardware.

For this reason, David Milman, Rescuecom's CEO, said that Asus’ reliability score should be “taken with a grain of salt”. In other words, its score was something of a 'statistical anomaly'. Not so Lenovo's and for that reason the ThinkPad maker was awarded joint first place with Asus, despite the big differences in their scores.

Toshiba’s score dropped from 299 points in the December version of the report, to 172 points this time around – based on a market share of 5.8 per cent and call centre proportion of 3.4 per cent.

Acer sits just below Toshiba with 151 points. It didn’t feature on Rescuecom’s last report, but the support firm added that – in this latest version - eight per cent of calls received during the quarter were about Acer machines and that it had a 12 per cent market share.

Although HP had a 15.3 per cent market share during Q1, Rescuecom awarded the firm just 142 points – a drop of 42 points from the previous report. Unsurprisingly, the highest percentage of support calls – 17.9 per cent – was about HP machines. ®

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Posted Friday 27th March 2009 14:45 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Whether the report is accurate or not....

... who knows but I'm sure Acer's support didn't do well. Had to deal with them on a simple issue. Heard a story that Acer wouldn't support a Vista RTM system if it went to SP1. I contacted them and got the run around as I know someone with the same issue. Even a Microsoft advisor found it odd. Wouldn't touch an Acer unless it was the last brand on earth.

Apple must have good support. They are selling all these buggy and expensive products.

Posted Friday 27th March 2009 11:34 GMT

Stephen

How about also remembering

That ASUS is one of the major systems builders for Apple. Apple doesn't actually build any machines any more, it just specs a system, designs a case and farms the work out. It doesn't surprise me when this leads to variable results for them as they swap suppliers with model updates.

Posted Friday 27th March 2009 11:34 GMT

@Phycho Flump & @Lennart Sorensen

I had to use Asus support for one of my machines and I have to say it was terrible. They Didn't listen to the problem and returned it to me in the same state it left (albiet with completely new (though not required) internals).

They picked the machine up, replaced the MoBo etc without questions and got it back to me in less than the time they originally stated - all good. The fact that the drivers were causing the problem is still annoying though.

On the other other hand I've owned 5 Asus laptops since 2002 (3 top laptops and a couple of eees) and I have not had a hardware problem with any of them yet. The one I purchased in 2002 is now enjoying retirement at my parents house where a P4 2GHz still has use :)