Apple fourth best among build quality study for portables
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 24 November 2009, 21:27 IST   |    11 Comments
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Apple fourth best among build quality study for portables
Bangalore: Based on laptop longevity, Apple is fourth in terms of reliability, as machines from the Cupertino company suffered a smidgen over 10 percent failure rate over a two-year period and an estimated 17.4 percent rate over three years. Asus, Toshiba, and Sony all had lower two-year and estimated three-year failure rates, with Asus taking the top spot at just under 10 percent over two years and an estimated 15.6 percent over three. SquareTrade, a company that offers extended warranties on all sorts of consumer electronics has published a study on laptop longevity based on 30,000 costumer experiences, reports Ars Technica. Also, the relevant statistics are based on laptops that failed due to "natural causes" - not machines that were accidentally damaged. These numbers are broken up among nine different manufactures, all of which had a sample size of at least 1,000 units. Although Apple isn't on top, it can at least look at Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, and Hewlett Packard as companies that provide inferior quality laptops. While Dell was less than one percentage point above Apple on the three-year estimated statistics, HP had an estimated failure rate over of over 25 percent over three years. At first glance, these numbers might make it difficult for Apple apologists to use build quality as an excuse for what some may consider of being inflated price. However, without the statistics broken down further by model and cost, it's hard to make those assumptions. SquareTrade does present numbers earlier in the study that suggest cost does effect build quality, but at only a two percent difference in failure rate between the high end and low end. Of course, a company that sells warranties has every reason to make it appear that all kinds of hardware have a higher failure rate than they really do. Still, the statistics presented by SquareTrade seem reasonable and, frankly, the people who buy these types of warranties are likely to continue whether the numbers are high or low.

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