Thread: The strength of Apple laptops

A study says Asus SquareTrade manufacture the consumer notebooks toughest, Apple came in fourth position.

An imperfect methodology

The report is based on over 30,000 phones, over a period of two years and offers a forecast for the third year, which is based on the final results of the study. The firm had monitored a minimum of 1 000 machines by brand. In fact, it has actually sold a guarantee to consumers of portable computer and reports back to its customers.

We believe this methodology is interesting, but contains two major flaws. The first is that SquareTrade limit its study to the American consumers who choose to report their problems, thereby reducing its geographic scope and relevance. Indeed, all consumers do not use their guarantee if something goes wrong, especially if it is something of Benin as replacing a hard drive or a memory module.

The second problem is that very few average consumers go through the SquareTrade warranty, limiting even further the relevance of this study. Indeed, a user usually tends to take the manufacturer's warranty or the store, instead of going through an independent firm designed to meet special cases. This is especially the case for the apple products that are often provided by AppleCare. In short, the panel surveyed does not appear as representative as that of other similar studies.

The relevance of results

At global level, analysts believe that a third of the machines fall short after three years, 20.4% of them due to a hardware problem and 10.6% due to an accident. Asus topped the rankings (accidents excluded) with only 15.6% of faulty machines are projected to three years, against 15.7% for Toshiba, Sony 16.8%, 17.4% for Apple, 18, 3% Dell, 21.5% for Lenovo, Acer to 23.3%, 23.5% for Gateway and 25.6% for HP.

If these results are interesting, they partially contradict the report by Consumer Reports (the U.S. equivalent of 60 million consumers) that were more accurate (they analyzed three segments separately, the 13-inch, 14 to 16 inches and 17 to 18 inches ). In any case, Apple had arrived first, followed by HP for the first category, Toshiba and Asus for second, Dell and Lenovo for the third.

Must scan the Study of SquareTrade of hand. We believe the answer is negative, which explains why we decided to address this issue. This study provides an overview of computer equipment available today and confirmed that some manufacturers such as HP and Acer have serious problems, which is corroborated by the report by Consumer Reports or a study. However, the methodology does not seem suited to very general statements that analysts of the insurer trying to do and it is questionable whether the fourth Apple reflects reality.

In our case, we just wanted to bring you all the evidence, clearly and objectively so that you can make your own opinion on a study that begins to spill much ink. For you to tell us if we succeeded.