Mac laptops less reliable than ASUS, Sony notebooks

Computerworld - Apple's line of laptops ranked fourth in a multi-year reliability survey of nine notebook makers, according to a study of 30,000 portable computers published today by a company that provides after-sale warranties.

SquareTrade, which broke out the warranty claims of its customers by manufacturers, said that Apple took the No. 4 spot, behind ASUS, Toshiba and Sony, which held No. 1 through No. 3, respectively.

Over a two-year period, slightly more than 10% of Apple laptops -- the company sells two lines, MacBook and MacBook Pro -- failed in some fashion, said SquareTrade. The projected failure rate of Apple's notebooks within three years, added SquareTrade, was 17.4%.

ASUS, Toshiba and Sony, on the other hand, sported projected three-year malfunction rates of 15.6%, 15.7% and 16.8%.

"It's not really surprising that Apple's in the middle of the pack," said Vince Tseng, the vice president of marketing at SquareTrade. "What was surprising was that ASUS came out on top."

Tseng defended his company's rankings against the inevitable backlash by opinionated Mac owners. "Ours is pretty similar to other studies that have been published," he said, pointing to those done by Consumer Reports in particular.

Hewlett-Packard, which shipped more notebooks in the past year than any other OEM, came in dead last out of the nine manufacturers, with a two-year failure rate over 15% and a three-year projected failure rate of 25.6%.

SquareTrade based each company's three-year projected rate on the failure curve of all notebooks, which rises quickly from year one to year two to year three. "There is a notable acceleration of malfunctions in the second and third years," SquareTrade said in today's report.

While only 4.7% of all notebooks failed from a hardware malfunction in the first year of ownership, that 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 increasingly high failure rate was no surprise. "Laptops have a high usage rate," said Tseng. "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."