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Apple #4 manufacturer in terms of Laptop reliability

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Many people who own Macs site product reliability and build quality as a big selling point for Apple computers, and a reason for price premium. SquareTrade issued a report of its findings of laptop reliability by manufacturer with Asus, Toshiba, and Sony comping out on top over Apple.

Here's the article by Gizmodo

The ones that surprised me the most were Dell and Lenovo; thinking the would have had respectively higher and lower failure rates.

One thing I don't is that in their summary they say 31% of all laptops will fail within the first 3 years, but the worst offender, HP, only tops out at 25.6%! Where is the 31% coming from? After there manufacturers not shown on the chart with huge failure rates?

I'll stick with my MBP anyway.
 

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That report makes me wonder as I know of so many with Toshiba's who have died or had serious hardware issues and they were very careful with them.

Also I find Acer notebooks to be some of the worst out there. Most I have worked with have issues, some right out of the box that can't be solved and very bad reliability.

My brand new Aspire One netbook has has many issues. Screen looks like it breaking out with measles or something. I have babied it also. Found report after report with people with my same LCD issues. Even worse it died and would not even boot or even load the bios. Very common issue as I soon found on google. You have to Re-Flash the Bios blindfolded with a special Flash Tool hidden on Acer's site. Very bad quality.
 
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I had a very nice $800 Toshiba Satellite a couple years back that completely failed. I always took care of it, but within 1 year it died. Instead of getting another one, I went out and got my MacBook and it's worked perfectly for me since 2007.

Only thing I have had to do was replace a faulty HDD, but that's common practice for ANY laptop. Applecare also gives me the peace of mind.
 
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I have read the PDF file about with the detailed information about this servey and found this.

SquareTrade randomly selected over 30,000 laptop and netbook computers for this analysis.

And this.

Only malfunctions reported directly to SquareTrade are included in the data. Other malfunctions, including software issues handled directly by the retailer, problems associated with product recalls, and those fixed by software/firmware updates, may not be represented in this data

Really 30 thousand is a pretty small sample size for a servey of this nature. And this to me is just a servey of "malfunctions reported directly to SquareTrade". And not all malfunctions in general. I think a lot of malfunctions are either fixed by the user themselves or sent other places to be fixed like to an Apple Genius for example.

So to me the servey is correct in what it is serveying. But people need to know it's not a notebook malfunction study in general. Only for ones sent to or fixed by SquareTrade. And the weblink in the first post does not advertise this fact.
 

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That report makes me wonder as I know of so many with Toshiba's who have died or had serious hardware issues and they were very careful with them.

Also I find Acer notebooks to be some of the worst out there. Most I have worked with have issues, some right out of the box that can't be solved and very bad reliability.

My brand new Aspire One netbook has has many issues. Screen looks like it breaking out with measles or something. I have babied it also. Found report after report with people with my same LCD issues. Even worse it died and would not even boot or even load the bios. Very common issue as I soon found on google. You have to Re-Flash the Bios blindfolded with a special Flash Tool hidden on Acer's site. Very bad quality.

Same here. My personal experience, based on hundreds of laptops - both in my professional life, and also in my little side repair business, suggests that this survey is dubious at best.

ASUS, despite being big in netbooks, is not yet an established brand outside of enthusiast circles. I think the level of user savvy will have a direct correlation in terms of overall reliability. I can't tell you how many times on a daily basis, a user self-diagnoses a hardware problem that doesn't exist.
 
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I have a question. Doesn't squaretrade offer warranties for used laptops? SO does this report show reliability for new or used ones? Either way, seems odd to me. Especially with asus being number one, and acer beating hp...surprisingly. I will stick with the Consumer reports results! It also doesn't mention how many of each laptop's results got to the test results.
 
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Really 30 thousand is a pretty small sample size for a servey of this nature.

Actually that's a HUGE sample size, if anything my statistics professor told me is even remotely correct.

And this to me is just a servey of "malfunctions reported directly to SquareTrade". And not all malfunctions in general. I think a lot of malfunctions are either fixed by the user themselves or sent other places to be fixed like to an Apple Genius for example.

I have a question. Doesn't squaretrade offer warranties for used laptops? SO does this report show reliability for new or used ones?

SquareTrade does off warranties, which is where the data used in the survey comes from. People who's one-year manufacturer warranties have expired can go to third party companies like SquareTrade and buy extended warranties. With an MBP, for example, they would go to ST because it may be a cheaper alternative to Applecare.

Bottom line is the data is from people who bought warranties from them, so why would they go to Apple and pay to get something fixed when they've bought a warranty to cover it? For this reason, and because I don't see any reason why they would want to manipulate the results of one manufacturer over another, I'm fairly comfortable with the result provided they didn't make any errors. It would be interesting to see the actual computers included in the sample though.

For all the people saying they don't think ASUS should be on top I think you're mainly considering ASUS's wildly popular netbooks as a reference, which the study did point out are the least reliable computer for any group. ASUS does make other computers than netbooks which may be much more reliable.
 
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I guess the people who had those were just unlucky. I have never had to take back my Mac at the Apple Store to get it fixed/serviced. Now that I think about it, I did have a kernel panic, but I forgot how I fixed it. I never took it in. But that kernel panic doesn't degrade Apple's quality and reliability in my book. I still find Apple to have one of the most reliable computers anyone can buy.
 
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83% of all statistics are just made up!







11% of people know this ;D
 

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I can also attest to Toshiba laptop failures, both Satellites I believe. Over the past five years, my mother purchased a Toshiba laptop from Best Buy with an extended warranty. It failed two times, then on the third return she was given a new Toshiba, newer model. It worked for a couple of years fine, then it failed just outside the extended warranty.
 
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I can also attest to Toshiba laptop failures, both Satellites I believe. Over the past five years, my mother purchased a Toshiba laptop from Best Buy with an extended warranty. It failed two times, then on the third return she was given a new Toshiba, newer model. It worked for a couple of years fine, then it failed just outside the extended warranty.

I know exactly where you are coming from. My Satellite had a hardware failure (the CD/DVD drive) and a failed internal Wi-Fi card sometime in the first year I had it. Now all it's used for is Spider Solitaire (when my grandpa plays it). The box takes about 5 minutes to boot up, it's basically not even worth turning it on to use the internet. You will forget what you wanted to use it for by the time you are able to actually use it anyway.
 

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That report makes me wonder as I know of so many with Toshiba's who have died or had serious hardware issues and they were very careful with them.
I have my two best friends fall victim to the absolute horrible quality of Toshiba laptops. I do everything I can to convince people to avoid Toshiba machines.

In terms of the statistics, 30,000 is a quite substantial sample.
 
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In the end it's very general. I think it's interesting how people take something like this and think that their own one or two personal experiences totally discredit the fact.

Just in case, here's another piece of anecdotal evidence: my MBP's logic board needed replaced within the first year...
 
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I own an Asus netbook, and have not had a problem with it at all doubt that I ever will.
 

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I own an Asus netbook, and have not had a problem with it at all doubt that I ever will.

Asus makes my favorite Motherboards for Windows machines so somehow that does not shock me at all. If I can I always use Asus boards.
 

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In the end it's very general. I think it's interesting how people take something like this and think that their own one or two personal experiences totally discredit the fact.
Very good point but many of us only have one or two personal experiences with a brand with which to make a judgment (which is inevitable). Using my previous post as an example, I'm sure many people are happy with their Toshiba notebooks. In my own experience though, I've never seen notebooks burn and crash like Toshiba ones.
 
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That report makes me wonder as I know of so many with Toshiba's who have died or had serious hardware issues and they were very careful with them.

Also I find Acer notebooks to be some of the worst out there. Most I have worked with have issues, some right out of the box that can't be solved and very bad reliability.

My brand new Aspire One netbook has has many issues. Screen looks like it breaking out with measles or something. I have babied it also. Found report after report with people with my same LCD issues. Even worse it died and would not even boot or even load the bios. Very common issue as I soon found on google. You have to Re-Flash the Bios blindfolded with a special Flash Tool hidden on Acer's site. Very bad quality.

Strange, is the new model or last years model? Because that hasn't happened to either one that I own.

As for Toshiba's laptop reliability, I just had to replace the whole freakin' motherboard as of Monday. The old board fried somehow. I still don't see where they're getting these numbers.
 
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I had a nice looking compaq presario of some sort back in 2006 for only 3 months so I can't attest to its durability....thankfully it held up long enough to get stolen out of my car so I could upgrade via insurance replacement cost + a bit of cash to a MacBook Pro :D
 
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We have a lot of MacBooks in the school district, and from my experience with them I do not find it surprising that Apple is lower than usual with product reliability.

We have had at least 15 MacBooks fail with heat issues. Apple has tried several times to get things patched up with firmware upgrades basically telling the SMC to wait for a higher temp to shut things down. But the tech dept still keeps getting in MacBooks with random shut down issues. I have one sitting on my desk now that the latest firmware upgrade did not fix, so I am replacing the MLB and heat sink.

Along side that we have had an unacceptably large number of issues with the DC-in port going bad. In addition to a dozen MacBooks, 6 MBPros with that issue have crossed my repair desk, out of only 30 or so MBPros in the district. That's almost 20 percent.

It only takes a couple of common problems to have a profound effect on reliability numbers of a product line.
 

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