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Comments: 264 +- Mobile: Netbooks Have Higher Failure Rate Than Laptops on Friday November 20, @01:32PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday November 20, @01:32PM
from the get-what-you-pay-for-sometimes dept.
from the get-what-you-pay-for-sometimes dept.
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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."
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Cheaper = Worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends though. Something with a smaller screen, no dvd drive, etc. should be possible to make cheaper for the same or less money.
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:5, Funny)
"For less money" is how "cheaper" usually works, yes.
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Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Value priced + Early in Life Cycle = Poor Quality
Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, given their size and portability, I'd expect netbooks to have harsher treatment than a laptop. Laptops are big enough you think 'expensive computer' when you are handling one, where netbooks are (intentionally) designed to feel like they are more of a 'mid-sized electronic device'.
It's not much, but it could well account for a 1% difference, IMHO.
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
iPod: Fits in pocket.
Netbook: Doesn't.
Couldn't that have something to do with it?
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Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:4, Interesting)
I always found Sony laptops to be the worst. Every year old Sony laptop I have ever seen has an LCD with colours so washed out, that the only things I would use it for is as a paperweight, or doorstop.
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Re:Correlation != Causality (Score:5, Interesting)
To insert some unscientific anecdotal evidence; I've had my MacBook back in for repairs three times since I got it two years ago. But the issues I've taken it back for (some faint marks on the screen, and two cracked palmrests) I would have (and indeed have in the past) tolerated on a cheaper laptop with a manufacturer without a highstreet presence. My willingness to complain (and therefore register a failure) is raised because there's someone I can walk to and yell at who will fix it quickly and for free.
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:4, Funny)
I can not see in any way how taking something apart and putting it back together repeatedly, occasionally ending up with extra pieces would effect the reliability of any product.
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Re:Cheaper = Worse? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Very often a less expensive product is indeed equal or even superior to the more expensive one. Whenever anyone says "you get what you pay for," hold on to your wallet. You usually pay for what you get, but you don't always get what you pay for.
Generic naproxen sodium costs 1/4 as much as Aleve, but they are identical except for price. Only fools waste their money on brand name drugs when there is a generic equivalent; naproxin is naproxin regardless of whose brand is on the bottle.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, the placebo effect works without any drugs at all. Might as well package M&Ms as painkillers. Anyone who realises that the generic an the name brand are identical will have the same effect for either.
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.
HP was the worst - I can tell the same (Score:4, Interesting)
My two year HP pavillion dv6535ep laptop exibited the following behaviour during time:
* After two months:
- A lcd pixel near the bottom right corner stoped working, it is red all the time.
* After four months:
- Maximum battery capacity lowered to less than half.
* After a year and couple of months:
- The integrated (USB) camera stopped working due to bad contact on wiring near screen hinge. The camera starts/stops working everytime the screen is tilted.
* After two years:
- The power supply adapter stopped working (it shorts the mains when it gets too hot).
My previous laptop was a Acer Aspire 1520:
* The battery capacity didn't go below ~80% after four years.
* The nvidia graphics card failed after one year and something.
* The power supply adapter failed with a lot of white smoke after two years and something.
* A SMD transistor popped up from mainboard after five years. After soldering it myself, the laptop continued working perfectly until today.
And yes, I'm carefull with laptops, I take proper measures to preserve battery life and my house's electrical mains are not faulty.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking as a former HP lead repair tech, the hardware is pretty much identical. Board configurations might be different, but just by a little bit, depending on whether it's intel or amd based. They all use the same Realtek audio, altec lansing speakers, most (business and consumer class) come with discrete graphics, which means you can upgrade that, they all use Intel wireless, the ethernet depends on intel or amd base again.
The motherboard failures were mostly caused by faulty die packaging around the GPU
And? (Score:4, Funny)
Sometimes insightful looks into popular things really makes me sit back and think...
This just makes me say, "So what?"
HP - more like HA (Score:2)
HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years
In order to malfunction it first must function, something HP's don't do very well, especially with all the nice bundled packages I have pre-installed.
what do you expect? they are consumable devices (Score:2)
They're made to be chucked in a dumpster at the airport when they fizz out. This just sounds like a vector to complain about something that's junky cause it's cheap being junky.
Netbooks get handled a lot rougher . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
MISPWOSO (Score:5, Funny)
Surprised but it makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, one of the things driving interest in NetBooks is their price. For makers to make money on them, they have to make them using lesser standards than their more expensive units. After all, a great deal of the same stuff goes into each and to keep the prices down, something had to give.
Besides, when the price is that low, people tend to start thinking of these netbooks as "disposable" and worry less about problems.
SquareTrade (Score:2)
1.1% to 1.6% doesn't seem like that huge of a difference especially when we are talking about a device that is smaller and obviously more fragile than it's beefier compatriots. Not to mention the lower standards of quality when manufacturing a practically disposable mini computer.
Completely offtopic, but I remember almost getting scammed by someone on Autotrader.com years ago that wanted to use a third party company to hold my money while I test drove the car in question. The supposed third party was actual
While I have no doubt this is true... (Score:3, Insightful)
While I have absolutely no doubt that $300 netbooks die more often, there's no way I'm going to trust the numbers from a company that primarily offers warranty service to computers sold on Ebay.
I strongly suspect that a lot of the Apple, Dell and (especially) Lenovo notebooks they're servicing are several years old and are probably used or lease return models to begin with.
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.
Parent
Jive with anyone else's experience. (Score:4, Interesting)
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. Toshiba appears to have consistently low failure rates. I'm glad to see that Apple and Sony have improved (assuming the accuracy of the report), and very disappointed at Dell's slide.
Still, as an IT support guy, those numbers don't jive with what I see. Apple laptops need warranty service far more often than this study indicates, in my experience. I'd like to know more about the methodology of the survey.
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.
Parent
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.
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Nvidia? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how much of the failure rates is due to problems with Nvidia chips?
Before I get downmodded as a troll or for flamebait, please note that Nvidia has had well documented problems with reliablility, due to materials used in the chip bumping and finishing processes.
I suppose it's not too shocking (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't too surprising, really. Whenever you go for the cheap end of things, you get poor quality.
Now don't understand me-- I'm not saying that it's good. I think it'd be great if we could make cheap things also be good quality. Like I imagine someone could manufacture netbooks and still sell them relatively cheaply just by virtue of the fact that they use fewer components and less materials. However, the tendency in a situation like this is for the manufacturer to say, "These are cheaper products with tight profit margins. These are also budget products, and people who buy budget products will tend to buy the cheapest thing available. Let's just cut every corner, make them as cheap as possible, and not worry too much about quality." It's the same reason we get $5 blenders at Walmart that break after a year.
Of course, the problem is often that it's hard for consumers to tell the difference, so companies sometimes don't provide a good middle ground. Like you might find yourself in a situation where you can find a cheap $5-10 blender that will break in the next year, and the next step up is a $1000 "luxury" blender with a built in toaster oven, speakers, and iPhone dock. I guess simple, high quality, economical goods don't sell.
Aren't netbooks more likely to get transported? (Score:3, Insightful)
Question the source (Score:4, Interesting)
Another /. story brought this to my attention and I did some digging. It turns out that the entire tech-blog-sphere is basing their articles on a 'study' done by Squaretrade, a company that sells extended warranties for computers and phones. I won't get into the ethics of selling warranties for brand-new computers that already carry OEM warranties.
The problem is that Squaretrade is in direct competition with Apple's Applecare. A few quick searches on their website shows that their plans cost more than applecare and that they lack some of the features of applecare (phone support, apple store support, ups dropoff service, etc).
So my advice is to take that bar graph with a grain of salt.
-b
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Macs aren't more reliable, they just get less use (nothing important runs on them), so they take longer to wear out.
Uhhh ho...you've done it now. *loud-whiney voice* C'MON [fan]BOIS, LET'S GET HIM!!!
Re: (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: (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: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...
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Re:What "legendary reliability of Macs"? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.)
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Re: (Score:3, 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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Squaretrade claim to have only included new purchases in this survey.
Also thier definition of netbook is based on price alone, some very cheap craptops may sneak into the netbook category while the high end netbooks that have started appearing on the market would be lumped in with the low end notebooks.
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Just goes to show you, there's a sucker born every minute, and that company takes advantage of them.
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Re:Things that make you go, hmmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
They are just heavy enough that they don't feel "light" in a flimsy way; but they are typically light enough that they don't flex when you pick them up(which is probably also good for the motherboard). To make a 15 inch laptop that doesn't flex requires actual engineering and decent materials, of the sort that you need to buy a business box or an apple to get. 15 inchers made of boring basic ABS feel like flimsy crap. Netbooks with the same basic ABS construction don't feel nearly as flimsy, because they don't flex when you pick them up.
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