Netbooks Have Higher Failure Rate Than Laptops 264
Barence writes "Netbooks are more likely to fail within the first year than their more expensive laptop brethren, according to new research. SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analyzed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties. It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than $1,000. The research also raises question marks over the legendary reliability of Macs. Three PC manufacturers — Asus, Toshiba, and Sony — boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate. HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years."
Aha! (Score:3, Informative)
I thought my prejudice against HP laptops was just emotional or superstitious or something. 25.6% malfunction?? They really need to work on that.
Re:You think? (Score:3, Informative)
A Google search for "Aspire One fan" shows multiple vendors selling the fans for $20 or so, and a couple selling 'thermal modules' for about $40.
Re:What "legendary reliability of Macs"? (Score:4, Informative)
Mac laptops don't have "power plugs" attached to their mainboard-- they all use MagSafe adapters which suffer extremely little wear and tear. And the new unibody laptops are extremely rigid construction. I'm not sure your information is up-to-date...
Re:What "legendary reliability of Macs"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What "legendary reliability of Macs"? (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who professionally provided tech support for Macs for more than 15 years, I have to disagree with you. I do think that when Macs have problems, they have BIG problems, but overall they have proven (to me anyway) that they are generally much more reliable than systems made by Windows PC vendors.
As for this SquareTrade article, it wouldn't surprise me if Apple fell a few points behind other manufacturers, though I cannot possibly imagine why someone would buy a new Mac and get a SquareTrade warranty instead of Apple's excellent 3-year warranty. Makes me wonder if the Macs covered by SquareTrade are largely used? You can't buy them at Target.
I also find it very odd that this year's SquareTrade report is almost entirely the reverse of last year's [marketwire.com], when HP came out on top. Also, Lenovo is calling shenanigans [bit-tech.net] on this year's data.
Re:What "legendary reliability of Macs"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Failure rate? What about Support of failures? (Score:1, Informative)
Wrong. "Apple Care" is an insurance scheme much like any insurance - it is there to MAKE money for Apple. You may as well be praising your insurance company how great it is for paying for your house if it catches on fire due to faulty construction, or whatever. But it sure is not for free!
Re:What "legendary reliability of Macs"? (Score:4, Informative)
That being said, the MagSafe connectors are wonderful and I have never seen a model with that connector having power issues. The only issue I've seen on newer Mac laptops are broken screens, usually from dropping on concrete.
(Disclaimer: I work in an all Mac laboratory with huge ranges in the ages of all the Macs we have.)
Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:3, Informative)
What I was referring to is the fact that it doesn't necessarily have to be made with any less quality than something more expensive just because it is cheaper, since you are hopefully saving money just by the smaller screen/battery.
Re:You think? (Score:3, Informative)
anyone here know where I could get one (or at least, a 30x30x7 (mm))?
Don't know about x7, but here is 30mm L x 30mm H x 6mm W [digikey.com] fan. This is a 5V part without tachometer. There is also 259-1327-ND which produces higher airflow (and is noisier, I'd guess.)
Re:Jive with anyone else's experience. (Score:4, Informative)
I saw this the other day. What struck me most is that Sony and Apple have historically had the highest failure rates in the industry (maybe other than HP), and Dell has had among the lowest.
According to consumer reports, the opposite has been true for a long time. Dell used to have terrible rates, and as of the last study, was doing poorly for desktops, but near the top for laptops. Apple consistently scores the highest for laptop reliability among all companies.
Re:While I have no doubt this is true... (Score:5, Informative)
I'll defend them a bit - they say in their paper [squaretrade.com] that they exclude computers that were purchased as either refurbished or used.
But that's where my defense of their methodology ends. They say the total sample size was 30,000, and they analyzed 9 brands that had over 1,000 units each. IMHO, that's still a pretty small sample size. The margin of error on at least some of those numbers would be around ±3%; that would be enough for the "top 6" manufacturers to be roughly indistinguishable. Keeping that in mind, I'd say there are two groups of manufacturers, reliability-wise: Asus, Toshiba, Sony, Apple, and Dell are more reliable, and Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, and HP are less reliable - but only by a couple percent.
Also, I'd object similarly to their comparison of netbooks against the larger notebook market; they say in their paper that netbook market share was 10% of all laptops until Q4 last year, so I have to assume that their 1-year data is probably similar, meaning 10% of their 30,000 samples are netbooks. That means a margin of error around ±2%. However, the difference between netbooks and "premium laptops" in reliability at 1 year is only 1.6%.
Finally, I almost missed this, but all their 3-year reliability numbers for all laptops are "projections" from their 2-year data (their 3-year reliability numbers for netbooks are projected from just 1 year). So take any error they had at 2 years, multiply it by 3/2, and you're off even further - I suppose that means the margin of error on some of these numbers is probably closer to 4.5%.
All in all, I'd say their paper is a little light on numbers. There are a whopping 11 actual data points that they base all of their data on in the paper - the other 13 data points are projections (all but 1 is a projection from data that is not quoted in the paper). Add to that my general sense of distrust in anybody that sells an extended warranty, and, well, you get the idea.
Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Informative)
The summary may say that apple laptops are unreliable, but the article doesn't. It's just yet another example of slashdot bias. What the article says is that the top 4 manufacturers are all within 2% reliability of each other. There's then a jump of a 4% drop in reliability before you get to any other manufacturer.
If you want reliability, buy one of:
Apple, Dell, Sony or Toshiba.
I have to admit, I'm surprised by Toshiba in that list, but the other 3 don't surprise me at all.
The other surprise in there is that the often-touted-as-super-reliable Thinkpads fare very badly.
Re:Jive with anyone else's experience. (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure what type of I.T. support you do, but could your experiences be a bit limited because you work in corporate I.T. where only certain brands and models were purchased in any quantity?
I've done quite a bit of on-site service for people, and my experiences line up fairly accurately with some of this. I definitely see a *lot* of HP notebook failures out there. Dell always seemed to me like they build "hit and miss" products. It's a crap-shoot with them, essentially. They've produced some of the most durable and reliable laptops out there, and turned around and produced some total duds that practically ALL had failures in a 2 year time-frame. You can't really make blanket statements about Dell because depending on when you analyze the data, they're going to look really good, somewhere right in the middle, or really bad.
I used to like Toshiba products, but I've come to realize that they have a pretty high long-term failure rate. Satellites, especially, seem to suffer from a large number of motherboard issues. (Ever run across one that lets you power it on but powers right back off after 2 seconds or so? Usually a bad motherboard, and I run into it pretty often.) A buddy of mine had a Toshiba Qosmio (high-end media centric model) that died like that just out of the factory warranty period. Luckily, Toshiba had a "silent recall" on that one, which we found out about online. He was able to call in, demand they repair it under said recall, and get it fixed free -- but only after getting past a 1st. level tech. on the phone who wanted to charge him for the repair and denied knowledge of any recall.....
I haven't had real good experiences with Sony laptops either, all in all. It seems like they build really attractive and sleek machines, but they break fairly easily.
I was a bit surprised that Lenovo didn't rate better. I know their quality has gone downhill from back when IBM owned the Thinkpad line (and they weren't assembled in China). but they still seem to take a lot of design cues from the IBM days, and as a result, seem fairly well-built. They tend to have fewer "bells and whistles" than some models too, so less stuff to go wrong.
And Apple? I have a lot of experience with their notebooks. They do need warranty service occasionally. The idea that "they practically never break!" is kind of a myth. I mean, they do use the same hard drives and displays as everyone else .... But I've had better than average results getting an Apple notebook serviced by Apple while under warranty, and I think more people buy the AppleCare warranties on them up-front. If you have an issue and Apple overnights you a return mailer box to put it in, fixes it in 1 day, and overnights it back, how annoyed are you going to be about the problem vs. the guy with some other laptop that has to wait WEEKS for a repair? That's what helps Apple keep in the lead with "customer satisfaction", even if they don't have the absolutely least likely to break systems.