The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) today released its latest results on U.S. consumer satisfaction in the personal computer industry, including tablets, with Apple narrowly topping the charts for the thirteenth consecutive year.
Apple maintained its year-ago score of 84 out of 100 in the survey, consisting of interviews with 3,500 customers chosen at random and contacted via email in June to share their experiences with recently purchased products like Macs and iPads.
Samsung, in its second year of ACSI tracking, trailed just one point behind Apple with a score of 83 out of 100, a 6.4% rise compared to its 2015 score.
Much like the smartphone category, the personal computer industry has become a race between Apple and Samsung for both market share and customer satisfaction. Apple and Samsung dominate market share in the tablet category, but the two companies take divergent views on the future of tablets. Apple continues to add laptop-like functionality to iPads, while Samsung sees tablets as additional devices for entertainment and browsing that complement—but not replace—laptops.
Amazon, which manufactures affordable Kindle tablets but not traditional PCs, finished third in customer satisfaction with an 80 out of 100 score, while PC makers Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Toshiba rounded off the list with scores between 73 and 78. ACSI's scores are calculated using its so-called cause-and-effect econometric model, which it says is based upon survey-measured inputs of customer expectations, perceptions of quality, and perceptions of value.
While Apple's customer satisfaction remains characteristically strong, many customers are getting impatient with the current state of the Mac lineup. Beyond the 12-inch MacBook, our own Buyer's Guide lists all Mac models as Don't Buy due to the lack of updates in several hundreds of days. iMac: 350 days. MacBook Pro: 497 days. MacBook Air: 568 days. Mac mini: 712 days. Mac Pro: 1,013 days. The latest word is that new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models with USB-C could launch as soon as October.
Not surprising at all. iMac is by far the best desktop computer on the market, the MacBook is great, and hopefully new MacBook Pros will continue that trend.
I would add a personal anecdote. I will never forget when Apple replaced a two year old notebook because it broke down for the 4th time. They literally called to say "We're sorry. This isn't the kind of experience we want for our customers."
Then they asked if it would be okay to replace this machine with a brand new one - two generations ahead - and I said... Ah, yeah? Yeah, that would be fine. LOL
Pretty impressive how Apple stayed on top even with old hardware. Nevertheless, it really is time to refresh the Mac line. Apple cannot become complacent.
I really hope that means a wake-up call for Apple. If Samsung has reached this high in user satisfaction, Apple should definitely start focusing more on their Mac lineup if THEY want a high level of user satisfaction.
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Saturday April 27, 2024 12:41 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
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I would add a personal anecdote. I will never forget when Apple replaced a two year old notebook because it broke down for the 4th time. They literally called to say "We're sorry. This isn't the kind of experience we want for our customers."
Then they asked if it would be okay to replace this machine with a brand new one - two generations ahead - and I said... Ah, yeah? Yeah, that would be fine. LOL