The ChannelInsider reports that SquareTrade, a provider of PC extended warranty services, studied the failure rates of the most widely used notebook computers and found that an alarming one in three notebooks will fail within three years. The SquareTrade study proved the old adage that you get what you pay for. Premium priced notebooks had a lower malfunction and failure rate than lower-priced notebooks and netbooks. 3-year failure rate by price. SquareTrade says Netbooks have a 25.1% failure rate, Entry level notebooks have a 20.6% failure rate and Premium notebooks have a 18.1% failure rate.
According to the SquareTrade report
- HP is the market share leader in notebooks, and has the highest failure rate. Nearly 26% of its notebooks fails after three years.
- Gateway sees 23.5% of its machines fail after three years of use.
- Acer’s three-year failure rate is 23.3% .
- Lenovo has more than 21% of its notebooks fail or have maintenance issues after three years of use.
- Dell’s 3-year failure rate is 18.3%.
- Macs have a 3-year failure rate of 17.4%.
- Sony’s VAIOs have a 3-year failure rate of 16.8%
- Toshiba’s 3-year failure rate is 15.7%
- Asus has a 3-year failure rate of 15.6%.
Only 4.7% of all notebook computers failed from a hardware malfunction in the first year of ownership, that rate more than doubled to 12.7% by the end of year two, and then leaped again to 20.4% by the time three years had passed.
SquareTrade said that the increasing high failure rate was no surprise. “Laptops have a high usage rate,” Vince Tseng, the vice president of marketing, told ComputerWorld “People leave them on all the time, and notebook components are sensitive to heat. Two, they’re portable and take a lot of abuse. And three, they’re more complex than most other consumer electronics devices.”
RESCUECOM’s Computer Reliability Reportfor Q2 2009 shows similar results to SquareTrade’s results. The Syracuse NY computer support vendor reported in August 2009 that the ASUS brand of personal computers for the second time in a row, results have shown ASUS to be the newest leader in reliable personal computers.
- ASUS (416)
- APPLE (394)
- IBM/LENOVO (314)
- TOSHIBA (218)
- HP/COMPAQ (142)
The SquareTrade findings must have hit close to home because Lenovo corporate media relations contact Ray Gorman took some strong objections to the report. A point by point response from SquareTrade is available on their blog.
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Asus maintains it leadership position even though they introduced the Eee, an early notebook, in 2007. The challenge for Asus will be to maintain their position as they roll out more products and new models and gain corporate acceptance.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.