Apple has been named the computer maker that most satisfies its customers after it scored a personal best of 85 out of 100 - ten points above its nearest rival, Dell - in a key US customer satisfaction index.
The figures comes from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a survey that's been run by the University of …
"HOW THE F*** DOES COMPAQ SCORE LESS THEN HP WHEN THEY ARE THE SAME DAMN COMPANY?"
Very simply because HPQ have chosen to maintain HP PCs and HP-Compaq PCs as different brands. Just because the owners of the businesses are the same doesn't mean that the customer service experience is the same.
Consider this: until recently Aston Martin was owned by Ford, Bentley is a VW subsidiary, Ferrari is a Fiat subsidiary, Lexus is a Toyota subsidiary. Ask owners of these cars how satisfied they are with their customer service and compare the ratings of the respective pairs. You will get very different ratings. In fact, you wouldn't even expect VW to score the same as Bentley, or would you?!
"How many apple users have played with Vista for more than five minutes?"
Ah, my personal hell. I've had Windows Xp, Windows Vista, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Ubuntu and Fedora all installed on my Mac at various times in the past two years as I've worked through a number of deep customer issues (my very favourite being caused by Win XP's IPv6 implementation not being able to use IPv6 for DNS queries -- how brain-dead and unexpected is that?). No one has been more pleased about the advances in virtualisation than me.
I can tell you that they all suck. MacOS looks good and is good if you do only one thing. Otherwise you're always forking out another US$25 to $250 for some essential utility that Apple forgot to put in the box.
After using Vista, Windows Xp feels plastic, like it's going to snap at any moment. But Vista's security model is user interface disaster. Lads, go and have a look at SELinux -- see how it stops bad things first then raises a little flag which you can click on to see why the blocking happened -- that's the right UI model. Not asking "Infect machine with trojans/spyware/viruses, Y/N?" every five minutes.
Ubuntu. Stamping USER FRIENDLY on the cover doesn't make it so. It's nice, but increasingly dated. But if you need a widget to get stuff done, with no fuss it's installed and running five minutes later. Windows and MacOS -- take note.
The best operating system is the one which let's you get your job done, that doesn't get in your way. That is, the best operating system is the one you're most used to using.
Since I learned computing on SunOS (classic, not that weird BSD/SysV hydra-headed Solaris) than means I'm in the small camp that feels most at home with Fedora+Livna.
I recently had an issue with my iPhone syncing with my iMac desktop. I made an online appointment to see a 'Genius' in at a local (lucky for me) Apple Store and told them the problem. They couldn't solve it, stating they'd not come across the error messages before and promised to put the problem to the 'team'. Phone numbers were exchanged.
A week later I get a phone call from Apple Store ... head 'Genius' honcho asks if I'll bring my machine in for them to sort out free of charge (it's about 2.5 years old) ... oh, and if the computer is too heavy, phone from car park and a member of staff will help me. I'm going to take it in this week. This, by the way, follows them exchanging a non-working LaCie 1Tb drive for a new one when they couldn't even find my record of purchase!
It's all very well the naysayers having a go at Apple ... I don't know of another company which treats its customers like that and, oh boy, do I like it! And, no, Steve Jobs is not my lover!
I am not really that surprised at the bitterness the PC believers show towards Mac users. They appear to be so determined to run Mac's down.
Personally I wouldn't give any PC running any of the Microsoft products house room as that system is just so slow and unreliable. Hand on heart can not say the same for Macs. Plus all those cheap end PC's lumping every component onto the one board... great in an ideal world... but ... Nah!
Oh dear god, please just stop beating the dead horse.
Ok im only going to say this once. And i think i have this whole mac versus pc debate sorted once and for all.
If you are the kind of person that wants to be creative but doesnt have the time patience or mental capacity to learn the inner workings of a computer then you buy a mac.
If you want to also be creative, but also blow away nazis and space aliens in a technicolour bloody frenzy, BUT also like to mod your own machine tweak software and learn about a computers inner workings because you have the time, patience and mental capacity to do so, then you buy a pc.
I have used both macs and pc's over the years and no matter how much they mac lover argue this a mac will never ever ever be as good as a pc for games. I've used an 8 core mac pro with dual nvidias, 8gigs of ram and it struggled to run any half decent recently released game. My pc is literally a quarter of the specs and is twice as powerful, methinks maybe the os licks balls, who knows im no expert.
Mac users you may be smug about your lack of virii etc, but thats only because you are such a small market share that its not worth writing virii to attack you, why spend months researching a worm to only have it infect a handfull of people. Not smart thinking at all.
Macs are becoming more popular, and the more so that they do, the bigger a target that they become for virii. I dont wish to see anything happen you you mac guys, but at the end of the day, if it takes an army of worm writers to take that pointless smug look off of your face, then i cant wait for it to happen. Then i can tell them that finally they have reached the world of REAL computing and not just playing with pretty icons.
Where do comments about OS v OS come into this hardware based article?
Yeah, Apple are way better than Dell in that area. HP are also way better than Dell though, so not sure what happened there...
I agree with the person who pointed out that HP and Compaq are one and the same now... Surely, even if the end users on the phone were talking about them in two different names, the results should have been merged? Correct me if they still run separately enough to be considered thus, but I'm sure all the Compaq gear I've seen lately is clearly marked "HP Compaq".
Microsoft? Linux? well they don't even make PCs so they can bugger off out of this conversation! :D
Paris, because even she knows the difference between hard and soft.
I just got back in from a training session. A very nice lady who works as a freelance executive assistant. (i.e. She works a few hours here, a few hours there etc. for a number of different clients.)
One of her new clients is Mac based (in French) and has asked me to bring her up to speed on using the Mac.
After an hour or so of going through the differences, similarities and what-nots with Windows (which she has been using for a good number of years) she suddenly says "I like this, it's much more logical. I think I might just get me one."
Now I didn't put the words into her mouth, and I was using an older G4 eMac, but it does illustrate that when you have time to sit down with a "guide" the user experience is much more positive, and the "simplicity" of the system as a whole can be appreciated.
As many have said it's about how they deal with the issues, problems, questions etc
And Apple really are that much better than others, I look after a range of machines from HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and Apple - each and every time the support and response from Apple has been excellent, prompt responses, sensible answers, knowledgeable people and in the event of it needing a hardware fix a prompt service and they genuinely seem to want to help.
Apple store/Genius bar... whatever it is, it's always the same....
Sure there have been some questionable reliability issues with components over the years, but i've had a new power supply and two new Mighty Mice completely free all delivered within 1 working day. Maybe they parts shouldn't have failed, but they did and no amount of moaning will get over that, but they way the problem was dealt with was stunning.... compare that to toshiba telling me to f**k off (not in quite those words) when we had power supply, battery, display issues....
"... a mac will never ever ever be as good as a pc for games."
I don't know if what you say is true, but if it is, then that alone would make it a perfect reason for us to switch to Macs in our company. Games are totally forbidden here. Anybody who gets caught playing games on office computers or during working hours (or even during lunch time) will be fired immediately, it's in the employment contract.
The nice side effect this seems to have had is that everybody working here is opposed to computer games, people who like computer games do not like to join our company and so we have a much more mature working atmosphere, which I have to say I quite enjoy. I personally don't like computer games, if I did, I probably wouldn't be working here :-)
Anyway, we use mostly FreeBSD, the guy in charge of the website uses Windows, the marketing department uses Macs, some who need notebooks have Macs too. If it was impossible to play games on Macs, I am pretty certain our board would mandate the use of Macs for everybody.
@Daniel B, about Mac viruses: "there was another one with a V logo (can't remember its name)"
Probably Virex; they had a V logo. I used Virex for a while before switching to NAV (Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh) back when I was still using System 7.5.3-rev-something-or-other. NAV did actually apprehend one genuine Mac virus once; I forget what it was called.
@Nick Fisher: "Yep, my first Mac was a 2 Mb LC running System 6.0.7." "I remember paying for the VRAM upgrade so I could have 8 bit colour on a 13" screen." "Happy Days!"
Yep :) I hear ya, man. I like the old OS's. Well, some of 'em, anyway. VRAM upgrades - yeah, did one of those just a few years ago - to a whopping ;) 4 MB total VRAM - so I could use a modern big PC monitor after the last of my several old Apple Multiscan 15" monitors went bye-bye. That allows millions of colors at 1152 x 870 on the main 19" monitor. With a palette monitor on the side (dual monitors, via also-4MB ATI PCI card) for Photoshop tinkering, it's okay. :) Oh by the way, I have one of those 13" Apple monitors like you mentioned - I bought it used in the 1990s and - amazingly - it still works (it was my palette monitor for a long time) - although it's gotten dimmer and a little warped in recent years, maybe taking after me. ;) I still use Mac OS 8.1 (with appropriate 3rd-party tweaks to make it more user friendly, like getting rids of stripes in list view windows, open/save dialog-box enhancements, etc), after years of stubbornly refusing to budge from System 7.x.
Back to the topic, about customer service, I've had several distinctly different experiences with Apple customer service, ranging from excellent (back in the '90s when everyone thought Apple was dying) to truly awful (after Apple was back in the black and flying high - hmm, well, maybe coincidence, maybe not). I suppose if one were to average them out, they'd be, well, average. However the last customer-service experience was the awful one, so it's fresher in memory and it's part of the reason that, a few years ago when I had to choose whether to buy a PC or a Mac, I chose a PC. It's just hard to forget an incredibly bad customer no-service experience - makes a person not want to spend money there anymore, or ever.
From what some people are saying here, though, modern Apple seems to have repented ;) and put the focus back on customer service, so my earlier bad experience with Apple customer service might not be relevant in today's world. I'm still wary of them though.
Ideally, as I think someone else might have already pointed out, one would not *need* customer service because there wouldn't be very many occasions for its use in the first place (defects, DOA, whatever). Not realistic though.
Register
Apple has been named the computer maker that most satisfies its customers after it scored a personal best of 85 out of 100 - ten points above its nearest rival, Dell - in a key US customer satisfaction index. The figures comes from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a survey that's been run by the University of …
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@ James O'Brien
"HOW THE F*** DOES COMPAQ SCORE LESS THEN HP WHEN THEY ARE THE SAME DAMN COMPANY?"
Very simply because HPQ have chosen to maintain HP PCs and HP-Compaq PCs as different brands. Just because the owners of the businesses are the same doesn't mean that the customer service experience is the same.
Consider this: until recently Aston Martin was owned by Ford, Bentley is a VW subsidiary, Ferrari is a Fiat subsidiary, Lexus is a Toyota subsidiary. Ask owners of these cars how satisfied they are with their customer service and compare the ratings of the respective pairs. You will get very different ratings. In fact, you wouldn't even expect VW to score the same as Bentley, or would you?!
@Daniel B
Yep, my first Mac was a 2 Mb LC running System 6.0.7.
I remember paying for the VRAM upgrade so I could have 8 bit colour on a 13" screen.
Happy Days!
Love the one you're with
"How many apple users have played with Vista for more than five minutes?"
Ah, my personal hell. I've had Windows Xp, Windows Vista, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Ubuntu and Fedora all installed on my Mac at various times in the past two years as I've worked through a number of deep customer issues (my very favourite being caused by Win XP's IPv6 implementation not being able to use IPv6 for DNS queries -- how brain-dead and unexpected is that?). No one has been more pleased about the advances in virtualisation than me.
I can tell you that they all suck. MacOS looks good and is good if you do only one thing. Otherwise you're always forking out another US$25 to $250 for some essential utility that Apple forgot to put in the box.
After using Vista, Windows Xp feels plastic, like it's going to snap at any moment. But Vista's security model is user interface disaster. Lads, go and have a look at SELinux -- see how it stops bad things first then raises a little flag which you can click on to see why the blocking happened -- that's the right UI model. Not asking "Infect machine with trojans/spyware/viruses, Y/N?" every five minutes.
Ubuntu. Stamping USER FRIENDLY on the cover doesn't make it so. It's nice, but increasingly dated. But if you need a widget to get stuff done, with no fuss it's installed and running five minutes later. Windows and MacOS -- take note.
The best operating system is the one which let's you get your job done, that doesn't get in your way. That is, the best operating system is the one you're most used to using.
Since I learned computing on SunOS (classic, not that weird BSD/SysV hydra-headed Solaris) than means I'm in the small camp that feels most at home with Fedora+Livna.
First Class Service
Ok, a concrete example ...
I recently had an issue with my iPhone syncing with my iMac desktop. I made an online appointment to see a 'Genius' in at a local (lucky for me) Apple Store and told them the problem. They couldn't solve it, stating they'd not come across the error messages before and promised to put the problem to the 'team'. Phone numbers were exchanged.
A week later I get a phone call from Apple Store ... head 'Genius' honcho asks if I'll bring my machine in for them to sort out free of charge (it's about 2.5 years old) ... oh, and if the computer is too heavy, phone from car park and a member of staff will help me. I'm going to take it in this week. This, by the way, follows them exchanging a non-working LaCie 1Tb drive for a new one when they couldn't even find my record of purchase!
It's all very well the naysayers having a go at Apple ... I don't know of another company which treats its customers like that and, oh boy, do I like it! And, no, Steve Jobs is not my lover!
Funny
PC users are so bitter...
Touchy people
I am not really that surprised at the bitterness the PC believers show towards Mac users. They appear to be so determined to run Mac's down.
Personally I wouldn't give any PC running any of the Microsoft products house room as that system is just so slow and unreliable. Hand on heart can not say the same for Macs. Plus all those cheap end PC's lumping every component onto the one board... great in an ideal world... but ... Nah!
Oh dear god, please just stop beating the dead horse.
Ok im only going to say this once. And i think i have this whole mac versus pc debate sorted once and for all.
If you are the kind of person that wants to be creative but doesnt have the time patience or mental capacity to learn the inner workings of a computer then you buy a mac.
If you want to also be creative, but also blow away nazis and space aliens in a technicolour bloody frenzy, BUT also like to mod your own machine tweak software and learn about a computers inner workings because you have the time, patience and mental capacity to do so, then you buy a pc.
I have used both macs and pc's over the years and no matter how much they mac lover argue this a mac will never ever ever be as good as a pc for games. I've used an 8 core mac pro with dual nvidias, 8gigs of ram and it struggled to run any half decent recently released game. My pc is literally a quarter of the specs and is twice as powerful, methinks maybe the os licks balls, who knows im no expert.
Mac users you may be smug about your lack of virii etc, but thats only because you are such a small market share that its not worth writing virii to attack you, why spend months researching a worm to only have it infect a handfull of people. Not smart thinking at all.
Macs are becoming more popular, and the more so that they do, the bigger a target that they become for virii. I dont wish to see anything happen you you mac guys, but at the end of the day, if it takes an army of worm writers to take that pointless smug look off of your face, then i cant wait for it to happen. Then i can tell them that finally they have reached the world of REAL computing and not just playing with pretty icons.
Hardware survey?
Where do comments about OS v OS come into this hardware based article?
Yeah, Apple are way better than Dell in that area. HP are also way better than Dell though, so not sure what happened there...
I agree with the person who pointed out that HP and Compaq are one and the same now... Surely, even if the end users on the phone were talking about them in two different names, the results should have been merged? Correct me if they still run separately enough to be considered thus, but I'm sure all the Compaq gear I've seen lately is clearly marked "HP Compaq".
Microsoft? Linux? well they don't even make PCs so they can bugger off out of this conversation! :D
Paris, because even she knows the difference between hard and soft.
Can't think of a title for this one
so I'll just plough on.
I just got back in from a training session. A very nice lady who works as a freelance executive assistant. (i.e. She works a few hours here, a few hours there etc. for a number of different clients.)
One of her new clients is Mac based (in French) and has asked me to bring her up to speed on using the Mac.
After an hour or so of going through the differences, similarities and what-nots with Windows (which she has been using for a good number of years) she suddenly says "I like this, it's much more logical. I think I might just get me one."
Now I didn't put the words into her mouth, and I was using an older G4 eMac, but it does illustrate that when you have time to sit down with a "guide" the user experience is much more positive, and the "simplicity" of the system as a whole can be appreciated.
Support
As many have said it's about how they deal with the issues, problems, questions etc
And Apple really are that much better than others, I look after a range of machines from HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and Apple - each and every time the support and response from Apple has been excellent, prompt responses, sensible answers, knowledgeable people and in the event of it needing a hardware fix a prompt service and they genuinely seem to want to help.
Apple store/Genius bar... whatever it is, it's always the same....
Sure there have been some questionable reliability issues with components over the years, but i've had a new power supply and two new Mighty Mice completely free all delivered within 1 working day. Maybe they parts shouldn't have failed, but they did and no amount of moaning will get over that, but they way the problem was dealt with was stunning.... compare that to toshiba telling me to f**k off (not in quite those words) when we had power supply, battery, display issues....
@ Rob - Almost ...
Rob ... you almost got across some valid points and then you finish with ...
"Then i can tell them that finally they have reached the world of REAL computing and not just playing with pretty icons."
Which show you for what you really are ... a Tosser (and a bitter one at that!).
"Ok im only going to say this once"
and arrogant, too!
No, its NOT a hardware survey
"Where do comments about OS v OS come into this hardware based article?"
Pal, you got it totally wrong as well. The survey is not about software, true, but its not about hardware either. It is about CUSTOMER SERVICE.
Games? Perfect reason to favour Macs!
"... a mac will never ever ever be as good as a pc for games."
I don't know if what you say is true, but if it is, then that alone would make it a perfect reason for us to switch to Macs in our company. Games are totally forbidden here. Anybody who gets caught playing games on office computers or during working hours (or even during lunch time) will be fired immediately, it's in the employment contract.
The nice side effect this seems to have had is that everybody working here is opposed to computer games, people who like computer games do not like to join our company and so we have a much more mature working atmosphere, which I have to say I quite enjoy. I personally don't like computer games, if I did, I probably wouldn't be working here :-)
Anyway, we use mostly FreeBSD, the guy in charge of the website uses Windows, the marketing department uses Macs, some who need notebooks have Macs too. If it was impossible to play games on Macs, I am pretty certain our board would mandate the use of Macs for everybody.
Pointless
That's like asking muslims if they're satisfied with their religion.
Viruses, happy days, customer service...
@Daniel B, about Mac viruses: "there was another one with a V logo (can't remember its name)"
Probably Virex; they had a V logo. I used Virex for a while before switching to NAV (Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh) back when I was still using System 7.5.3-rev-something-or-other. NAV did actually apprehend one genuine Mac virus once; I forget what it was called.
@Nick Fisher: "Yep, my first Mac was a 2 Mb LC running System 6.0.7." "I remember paying for the VRAM upgrade so I could have 8 bit colour on a 13" screen." "Happy Days!"
Yep :) I hear ya, man. I like the old OS's. Well, some of 'em, anyway. VRAM upgrades - yeah, did one of those just a few years ago - to a whopping ;) 4 MB total VRAM - so I could use a modern big PC monitor after the last of my several old Apple Multiscan 15" monitors went bye-bye. That allows millions of colors at 1152 x 870 on the main 19" monitor. With a palette monitor on the side (dual monitors, via also-4MB ATI PCI card) for Photoshop tinkering, it's okay. :) Oh by the way, I have one of those 13" Apple monitors like you mentioned - I bought it used in the 1990s and - amazingly - it still works (it was my palette monitor for a long time) - although it's gotten dimmer and a little warped in recent years, maybe taking after me. ;) I still use Mac OS 8.1 (with appropriate 3rd-party tweaks to make it more user friendly, like getting rids of stripes in list view windows, open/save dialog-box enhancements, etc), after years of stubbornly refusing to budge from System 7.x.
Back to the topic, about customer service, I've had several distinctly different experiences with Apple customer service, ranging from excellent (back in the '90s when everyone thought Apple was dying) to truly awful (after Apple was back in the black and flying high - hmm, well, maybe coincidence, maybe not). I suppose if one were to average them out, they'd be, well, average. However the last customer-service experience was the awful one, so it's fresher in memory and it's part of the reason that, a few years ago when I had to choose whether to buy a PC or a Mac, I chose a PC. It's just hard to forget an incredibly bad customer no-service experience - makes a person not want to spend money there anymore, or ever.
From what some people are saying here, though, modern Apple seems to have repented ;) and put the focus back on customer service, so my earlier bad experience with Apple customer service might not be relevant in today's world. I'm still wary of them though.
Ideally, as I think someone else might have already pointed out, one would not *need* customer service because there wouldn't be very many occasions for its use in the first place (defects, DOA, whatever). Not realistic though.
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