For this annual survey, Choice – the Australian Consumer Association’s watchdog – asks over three thousand of its members about the devices they own, what they think of them and how they’ve held up over time.
Choice quotes on its website today: “We found that when it comes to reliability, Apple tops three of its categories – laptops, desktops, and tablets.”
For monitors, HP and BenQ were the winners for reliability. In the printer section, Brother and Canon came up as the most reliable brands.
Apple came out on top for what is a very important category to many customers and that is – service and support for laptops and desktops.
As Choice quotes: “No matter their quality, sometimes things go wrong with products. How the manufacturer responds to these issues can make all the difference to your experience and trust in the brand. We’ve given each brand a service score so you know how well they support their customers when they need it, although since we need enough feedback to report fairly, we can’t report this for all brands.”
For tablets, Apple topped the category as the most reliable brand of tablet and had significantly fewer reported problems than the other brands. Choice did say that “the majority of tablet owners have only had their devices a few years, so reliability over the longer term can’t be shown yet.”
Apple achieved the highest reliability rating for desktops with overall, 70 per cent of Apple owners saying Apple desktops are excellent.
Asus had a lower desktop reliability score than the other major brands reported here, yet it still received a strong owner rating – the majority of owners said Asus desktops are very good and 93 per cent said they would buy this brand again despite a quarter of Asus owners reporting major problems in the first four years.
Comparing reliability over the past 12 months, Apple had a significantly higher score than all other laptop brands. The most common problems reported with laptops were the computer continually running slow, the screen freezing, and shutting down unexpectedly.
For monitors, HP and BenQ rated the best for monitor reliability, but all brands scored highly with little differences between them. The survey results showed that computer monitors tend to be very reliable
with only three per cent of monitors experiencing a major problem in the first four years and only eight per cent having any problem at all in the first four years.
For more information, go to the Choice Tech Reliability Survey 2014 here.
|
