Boy, do we have a nice slab of
data for you to sink your teeth into today. The 3-year service history of more than 30,000 laptops has been pored over, analyzed, and reduced to gorgeous comparative charts, which you know you're dying to know more about. We should note, however, that the service was provided by SquareTrade, whose primary business is selling
extended warranties, but that shouldn't completely prejudice us against reaching conclusions on the basis of the presented facts. Firstly, netbooks have shown themselves to be on average 20 percent less reliable than entry-level laptops, which in turn are 10 percent more likely to break down than premium machines. In other words, you get what you pay for -- shocking, right? The big talking point, though, will inevitably be the manufacturer comparison chart above: here ASUS and Toshiba (
rather appropriately) share the winners' spoils, while
HP languishes in the ignominious last place, with more than a quarter of all laptops expected to suffer a hardware fault of some kind within three years. So, does your experience corroborate / refute this info? Keep it gentlemanly, okay?
posted November 17th 2009 11:09AM
Hmm Apple's not very good for the extra cost. . .
THAT is what you got out of this list?
I noticed that too....if you're going to charge outrageous prices, you should at least have great quality.....and whats wrong with him stating the facts?
THAT is what you dont get.
Why would they be any better? They use the same Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. parts as everyone else...
Who would by an extended warranty for a Mac from anyone but Apple? I seriously doubt this data says anything at all about Apple.
My first MBP gray screen of deathed during the setup process, as it was downloading updates. They declared that one DOA (does that sort of thing make it into these statistics?), and the replacement has been running for about 3.5 years since. The damned latch broke, so now it's ghettoized with velcro, but otherwise it's been pretty steady.
Grain of salt here: looks like the timeframe of this study means that it looked at the first generation or so of Apple notebooks after the Intel switch. Not a particularly good time for reliability in the land of Mac.
That's a good point, actually. Most of my friends with Apples tell me that they paid much more for their machine than I paid for mine, despite my machine's performance advantage.
They justify this by saying that their machines will never break, but their machines are often broken. they also say their machines are easy to use, but they have to take them to a "Genius Bar" to figure them out sometimes.
I think they are cool if you like that style (which I think is peculiar, but no prob). They are overpriced compared to the quality of product you get.
Apple's number on in customer satisfaction - because they "strongly advise" everyone to pay an extra 10% for apple care, because they're damn near guaranteed to have to use it... and thus the customer is satisfied with the service (unless no apple care or course)
Personally I prefer buying a computer for $200 - $700 less (including cr"apple care") that will not need to be taken in for:
- battery completely dying (non functioning)
- hard drive physically crashing (no data recoverable)
- fancy mag-safe plug and adapter turning brown / fraying / malfunctioning
^^ All these are personal experiences with friends or family's Macs
I always liked asus - my first and second netbook, and my 6yr-old motherboard that's still kickin strong after being on 24/7 for 4 of those years, and damn if my 3gHz p4 isn't still doing great with win 7 installed - (Alienware - skipped vista)
Just had a friend ask me about lenovo - now I have some numbers to send him :)
Yeah, it makes you wonder a little. Apple certainly brags about the reliability of their machines more than HP or Dell do, but I guess the lives of computers is ultimately limited by their most sensitive components, hard drives. No amount of money will fix that, sadly.
So I guess we can conclude that Apple reliability isn't anything to brag about, if this data is reliable. Still, there's always the support to consider...
No, you don't have any numbers to send him about Lenovo. Because this is not a reliable statistic. Unless you're trying to tell him that you're gullible.
I've only had one Thinkpad that was made by Lenovo, but it's excellent. For the money? Depends on how much you need a great keyboard.
@Gimboa
I'm so ecstatic that your Lenovo experience has been a good one! Good for you!
According to data presented you're not the only one!
My friend was wondering how they fare in terms of reliability - this graph shows information about that. I'll go ahead and assume it's not a farce. I'll go ahead and assume you're a Lenovo fanboi?
@phenoum It's no use making baseless statements. If Apple is #1 in customer satisfaction w.r.t. some metric, that's because it scored highest when categorically compared to other manufacturers, not because there was a difference in support types.
Those three things you listed – they're very common problems with all computers, and I've personally seen much more of it on computers of companies other than Apple. I even know of 8- and 9-year-old Powerbooks. It all just goes to show that we all have our stories about something being great or terrible. An anecdote isn't worth much, and shouldn't convince you of much. ;)
The number seem a bit iffy to me tbh. Down at the good end its saying 1 in every 6 or 7 laptops covered by these guys ends up having a fault...that's higher than I would have expected. I love this talk about apple products all being more expensive. Spec out a Sony and see what u get. its not much different for similar specs but imo not as good a build quality (Let face it ur going to pay a bit more for the high grade aluminium unibody).
If they're including battery deaths in this then that would make more sense since most laptop batteries start going down the pan around the 3 year mark.
I've had the worst history with Tooshitty (the Quasimotto series). Worse, extended warranty and support is parsed out to a third party (ServiceNET), which sucks royally!
I wouldn't be surprised if like 90% of this was the awful plastic MacBook. I had one and eventually convinced Apple to give me an aluminum once instead. So much better.
"In other words, you get what you pay for"
Apparently mid table performance if it's a Macbook.
Useless "data". Certainly for them to say they know anything about Apple is foolish since nobody buys extended warranties for Macs from anyone but Apple. Plus Apples service, support and quality consistently gets highest marks from any reputable organization. With everyone else a distant 2nd or 3rd especially dell which here is shown as only a little worse than Apple. Asus quality is very inconsistent which isn't surprising given the number of models they make and the low cost which does not allow for decent quality control during manufacture and support. HP consumer support and quality is always low in every study so that is not surprising here. But their business laptops are much better as is business support.
So this is a joke and the source should in fact "completely prejudice us" in taking this seriously. Get a clue Engadget. I know you will do anything for page vies but this is a bit much even for you.
@Mark Anderson
Well a macbook is a mid range product...makes sense. MacBookPro's on the other hand, especially this gen, I really can't see having a 1/6 or 1/7 'failure' rate as the charts suggest.
Why would you say that? It's just 2% more compared to Asus and Toshiba. And no wonder, Asus & Toshiba looks like computers from 1990 and they have nothing to break inside:)
Acer results took my attention, because their new machines looks pretty sturdy. Seems this study is quite old.
No wonder they've been pimping the "world's greenest notebooks" - works better than the taglin: "the world's most dependable notebooks if you don't count Asus, Toshiba or Sony".
This study alone doesn't qualify one maker or the other as "most dependable", though obviously it strongly hints against HP. We know Mac users are qualitatively different in some ways from previous surveys... maybe they use their laptops more intensively, causing wear and tear related failures more often just because they're dragged around and used more.
Or maybe it's the other way and Macs are even worse than the figures say. Who knows?
@Hosbie
Well since everyone else's figures include budget notebooks and Apple's don't then you can draw your own conclusions can't you?
Phenom (or whatever your nick is, I forgot in the last couple of seconds).
I'm pointing out that this statistic is unreliable and unscientific. Using to show anything is not a good idea.
You counter by saying that I'm providing an anecdote, but that's irrational on your part. My great experience with Thinkpad (which I was clear was mainly not lenovo) has nothing to do with how this statistic is unreliable.
You don't seem to think very well.
Actually, that's not true. Apple is still very high in the list. If Apple was second place, people would still say it's too low. That's not true. Also, premium laptops have a much better life than normal laptops, and ultimately netbooks, so you can count on the Asus, Tobisha, and Sony laptops in this test being the expensive ones, not the lightweight netbooks.
I have had my HP DV9033cl for four years. Not a single problem.
my three year old and six year old HP Pavilion laptops have never had a problem, and they have spent a lot of time around saltwater and at sea.
HPs are very reliable. But they are also very common, and their appearance makes them good gifts, so they are often in the hands of novice users.
Remember that the 'red' part of the chart is n admitted fabrication, and the blue part is not a reflection of the actual build quality. I think the chart is a clever way to get attention. I have had worse luck with Toshibas than HPs.
Having worked (past tense) in the HP laptop quality control *snicker* dept. I have to say...you are extremely lucky. I must say I did truly enjoy blowing them up from time to time and getting paid to do it :)
Yeah, I would be more apt to believe that the stem of the majority of these issues are from user misuse.
You're lucky. My TX1000-series died after 15 months...just outside of warranty. When I started researching the reason behind its sudden death, I found that the issue (second-rate southbridge chip that overheats and blows its solder points) was shockingly common. Same thing with my girlfriend's 15" compac, which just died again - for the second time - this morning believe it or not.
I'm well aware that all electronics have their issues, but the more I researched HP's notebook issues, the more blown away I was by the number of issues, the recurrence of issues over time and across models, and HP's complete lack of effort to resolve any of those issues.
hp for 7 years now and no problem
My HP Pavilion dv5 is in very caring hands. I obsess that it remains clean and safe as if it were my baby, and yet it has spent its first year in repairs for over an aggregated six weeks. 6 out 54 weeks it is out of service!!! No "misuse" involved, I am no novice user.
Though, to be honest, I don't blame any specific manufacturer. You can always find a bad apple. I just hope they will get me a replacement instead of the one I have.
DV9548US Intel based with a good batch of 8400GS chips still running strong almost 2.5 years later. DV6000, forget the exact model number, AMD TL-60/Nvidia 7150 chipset based machine overheats and shuts down if ran on anything other than a table top and its under two years old. Clean out the HSF and reseated the HSF with better thermal compound and it helped a bit. The AMD machine was less than half the price of the Intel machine 17" versus 15.4" and discrete versus integrated graphics play a little into the price difference I'm sure, but it does seem like I got what I paid for cheaper machine died first.
Working as a tech I see nothing but issues with HP dv series laptops - overheating issues with motherboards, video cards, loss of wireless down to overheating, thermal cut outs all the time.
Seriously, the dv and Presario derivatives are the worst line of laptops I have come across and the HP support pages for BIOS updates that you only find AFTER the machine has gone dead is a poor poor solution/excuse for shoddy design.
Yes, you are lucky. I've had an hp dv9000 series that has had problems off and on since I bought it, 3 years ago. After 6 months, the hard drive crashed -- hp customer support has got to be the WORST ever, btw -- called them and they sent me one fedex, got it in two days, reinstalled win xp media center edition (which also sucks) via recovery DVD, and it ran good until the hinge broke 8 months after that. Of course, out of warranty, so after haggling with them (the same way I did recently when my lenovo y510's hinge broke) I got them to fix the hinge. Then another 8 or 9 months and it broke again (hinge), but this time the screen surround cracked and split. A year later, some epoxy and a laptop that doesn't close, ever, and it's still running, after having to do 3 reinstalls due to blue screens of death -- but I didn't really fault hp on those (although I should).
Shockingly, it's still running after 3 years. It didn't like sp3, at all, had to do another reinstall from the recovery partition, but all in all, it'll work if I don't do anything to complicated with it (pretty much the internet for the wife and kids).
Needless to say, I'm not in the market for another hp, and I can't say that I'm surprised they're worst on that list even if the list is mostly meaningless.
The toshiba satellite I've been using for 4 years, for work has never given me any problems like those. Yet, I don't really care for toshiba either, so for what it's worth - I'm looking at sony for my next machine. They seem to have faired well on that list as well.
Congratulations, you fall into the other 75% category.
These results are interesting because they are somewhat similar to the annual PCMag reliability survey results. Similarities? HP sucks. Period. And Lenovo isn't as good as their reputation would make us think. Toshiba has decent reliability. And Asus, Sony and Apple are at the top. The differences? In PCMag's data, Acer and Gateway's more recent laptops have pretty good reliability (especially for their price). Dell seems to be worse than average too, and only HP is worse than them.
I find the "novice user" excuse to be pretty crappy though because I have now seen 2 different sets of data showing that HP is at the bottom of the pile BY FAR for reliability- one from this survey and one from PCMag users- people who are anything but novices. Quite frankly, I would never buy a HP these days.
@Dest,
Well-put. Though regarding lenovo, I'd suggest that Thinkpads are partially known for reliability, but their reputation also leans heavily on fair customer support and excellent durability (which is not the same as reliability).
Also, it could be that there's a big difference between a Thinkpad and another Lenovo laptop like an Ideapad, but I'm only throwing that out there as a possibility.
I guess i'm lucky lol. However i did by the one of the highest end HPs at the time, and from what a lot of other people have commented it seems as though the cheaper end laptops, of any brand, are the ones usually to fail. It would have been interesting to see this data broken down into higher end, lower end laptops to see if it really is you get what you pay for.
As for think pads, I had an IBM R40 that is still limping to this day lol. 1.6 ghz processor, 16 gb hard drive, 128 mb ram 16mb shared graphics memory. That computer took some abuse, hardware and software. That computer saw so many porn sites, and so many viruses lol.
As it stands now, I use my HP as a desktop since the battery only holds a charge for about 40 min, and I have a MacBook (aluminum unibody) that I use as my travel/convenience computer.
I was going to ask when people will realize that being "first" to comment anything doesn't actually make you cool.
Then I realized anyone retarded enough to still think it is cool - wouldn't be able to understand the question anyway.
In 7 months of owning a Sony, it failed twice and they had to replace the motherboard as well as HDD both times.
I had 3 succesive Sony laptops fail on me in one way or another - one in warranty, the other two about 6 months each out of warranty. I vowed never to purchase a sony product again as a result. Fool me 3 times...
The stupidest thing was the cheap plastic power connector warping such that the transformer's connection stopped working. A 25 cent saving on a 50 cent piece of plastic, and they forced me to buy a whole motherboard, which for their laptop, costs $500 apparently.
Screw design obsolescence. It's fine for pens. We're talking laptops. For some people their laptop is their life.
I have a friend with a VAIO and it sucks hardcore in terms of reliability of quality. I have a gateway on the other hand that's been good to me since '05...
The failure rate for all of my laptops is 100% at 3 years. That's the time when they fail to be fast enough.
Fast enough for what exactly? My parents still use a Dell desktop that's almost 7 years old now, running Windows 7. They use it for browsing, e-mailing, office documents and some light photo editing. I believe that it is still "fast enough" for them.
...I think it was a joke. A satirical jab at the fast rate at which technological innovation advances.
Well I'm on my second laptop, first (lenovo) blew in about a year and a half (screen backlight came on but nothing was displayed). My current one (fujitsu) has had the hdd, dvd, keyboard, battery x2 and psu replaced, and is held together with selotape, and has been blown out for dust countless times. It will be 2 in march.
Then again they are on 24/7/365, get thrown around, and generally used far more in far tougher conditions than they were designed for. It is all down to how you use them. (One of my old teachers had a 9 year old dell laptop that ran XP quite quickly, and worked fine).
I wish I had a failure rate that high.
Glad I always buy and suggest ASUS to other people
Same here!
Been faithful since I bought a G1, been buying them and recommending them to friends for many years.