back to article Apple routs rivals in sat survey

Apple has by far the highest level of customer satisfaction among computer-buying consumers, according to a recent study (PDF) conducted by ChangeWave Research. The study, which focused "primarily on the U.S. market," interviewed 3,115 consumers between February 2 and 9. Among consumers who purchased a desktop or laptop in the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Agreed

    I must admit to being stunned by Apple build quality and astounded at the hidden stuff built into, say, Time Capsule.

    Like the survey suggested I too am a bit stunned by no iNet thingy along lines of a 7" iPhone preferably with extremely extreme access to mobile.me and iDisk. Possibly with neat sync just in case incoming signals were poor (or alternatively neat dual work between synced iDisk should wifi signals be poor/slow or not exist.

    Now if only one could allow declared users online access to declared folders or alternatively create password protected folders with read & write options on iDisk/iWork with mobile.me going all sort of whizzy?

  2. Charles Manning

    Netbooks are beneficiaries?

    Bollocks. People are not going for netbooks because of the downturn. They're buying huge and increasing numbers because this is an emerging market.

    Like just about everything else, netbook sales have suffered. If 2007 buying levels were in place people would be buying a hell of a lot more netbooks.

  3. Mark Simon

    Anything but Vista?

    One obvious reason to be happy with Apple is that it doesn’t include Vista.

  4. P. Lee
    Linux

    "ultra-portable"?

    What are you - a psion shill?

    ... ah forget it, I'm too busy to attempt a FoTW... ;)

    I would suggest that the Mac Air is ultra-portable, but Apple doesn't play in the ultra-cheap market, be it for portables or desktops.

    Mac users are generally home users, therefore they don't need compatibility with a zillion and one business apps. iLife + OpenOffice pretty much covers most home requirements and offers much more useful and easy-to-access home-user functionality than a windows pc + ms office, so yes I would expect Apple users to be happier with their systems than their windows counterparts. "It just works" applies to the software, but more importantly, it applies to the computer handling what the users want to do. For all the new features in Vista, "it just works" will never apply because MS haven't gone much beyond the basic OS. Indeed, they may not be allowed to, but they can't because they don't control the hardware.

    Then you've got the self-selecting halo effect. Creative media types who buy Macs probably take good photos of their kids, edit them well and so they make good calendars which Apple print and which turns up in the post. We all like to receive packages and they come out well, so bonus satisfaction points for them and Grandma too. All this is received gratefully, with Apple branding.

    Relatively cash-rich and placing a great deal of importance on their photos, they know about time-machine so backups are made and disasters are easily overcome too.

    By focusing on what is profitable rather than mergers, acquisitions and being the biggest, Apple have successfully differentiated themselves using OSX. Yes Mac's are pretty and pretty expensive, but the real achievement is not fighting MS (as Novell tried to do) and keeping the discipline of maintaining focus on the market which makes you large sums of money. Their whole business model is predicated on being different.

    No-one in the Windows world can differentiate their hardware with software. If anyone bundles cheap software on Windows to differentiate their hardware, there are a million other systems out there to which the software can be, er, "ported." By having its own OS which it ties to the hardware, Apple sidesteps this issue. Having moved to an Intel architecture, however, it has become more of a problem, which is why it can't allow Hackintoshes - it would end up in the same place as MS.

    I'm eagerly waiting to see KDE 4.2 stabilise further. It is much improved over 4.0 but I'd like to see the gui be as stable as the OS underneath it. It certainly now compares (favourably) with Aqua for prettiness and features. I've long held that KDE has the best infrastructure but Gnome has the applications. Hopefully with 4.2 onwards, with akonadi and so on, the case for having native KDE versions of firefox, openoffice etc will become compelling.

  5. Antti Roppola
    Paris Hilton

    Engineering, Design & Standards

    Jobs (and I hope others in Apple) understand that good design and engineering gives good products. I bought a Mac laptop 12 months ago and it just works. It reminds me of the Sun workstations I used to have on my desk. Controlling the hardware and OS gives a smaller, managed target to hit.

    Anything using Windows is at an immediate disadvantage. The OS needs to run on a much wider range of gear and there's far less control over the OS. Vista's backward steps in usability (seriously, *three* seperate actions to run something as super user?) and random and changeable OS style guide don't help either.

    With stronger style guides, MS could very quickly narrow the satsfaction gap. Without Steve like vision at the helm, Apple could quickly end up back in the wilderness.

    Paris because you need substance under the style.

  6. Urs Keller

    Satisfaction is all that counts in the consumer space

    Most of the Gighertz, Terabites and 25-in-1-readers stuff is mainly a "mine is bigger than yours"-game.

    We are seeing the same thing that happened in the car industry: At some point in time, all cars have sufficiently powerful engines to drive at the legal limits. Then the focus of the advertising shifts to emotions and secondary aspects like car stereos, GPSs and car colours.

    Will e 500 hp engine get you faster to London on the M3? Will a 5 Ghz 16-core CPU help you write your complaint letter faster?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Don't work so hard

    Convincing others bah... Be a total snob and just let them be so they don't get a first hand experience.

    And netbooks, bah let them buy netbooks and be dissapointed after using the mac. No money, negative user experience is a good sales opportunity. Take the Intel netbiok spec and compare line by line to an iPhone and every line item matches, there is no differentiation to the spec in netbooks. Manufacturers are now coin outside the spec and they are upsizing them like mad buy the prices are also rising to where you end up with an underpowered laptop for not much cheaper than getting a full kit laptop. Use re smaller ones and cramped fingers await any who do serious typing or a conversion process from touch typing to finger pecking mode to eliviate the cramps. Light duty fine but thts where iPhone also excels in light duty Internet browsing and email tasks. I'd die I'd I had to type in it long term and get the same cramp hell of netbooks.

  8. D@v3

    just a thought

    Havnt seen webster around recently

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Partly psychological?

    Surely part of the reason that Apple beat everyone else is because of the brand. The build quality does tend to be good - not always, though, as my old iPod headphones could tell you - but people who buy Apple are buying in to the brand, and tend to be a lot more forgiving about flaws or missing features in their products.

  10. Dr Patrick J R Harkin

    "It just works"

    Mac software has a much better chance of "just working" as the developers have a much better grasp on what the hardware will be - how much oomph, how much storage, how fast the graphics system is - and what drivers are loaded - very few Macs have the software from a $4.98 network card thrown into the mix!

    My daughter's Mac is like my car - it just works and looking under the cover is like trying to open a Cylon. My PC is like the car I used to drive - it had bits from all over the place and whilst I was never told "Yeah, well, those windscreen wipers aren't rear-wheel-drive compatible" it wouldn't have surprised me.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    I'd be satisfied with my Mac ...

    ... as long as I didn't have to pay my own money for its over-priced shiney hardware

    ... as long as I'm allowed to install Vista on it

    ... and if only it came with a keyboard where the keys are in the right places.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    oh? I don't know?

    @myself (post #1)

    I think the smaller devices from Apple (iPod, iPhone, ... ) have synergised Apple products into a wider & emerging market.

    iPod &| iPhone > iMac > MacBook (Pro) > Mac Pro seems elegantly more doable?

    Apple's product portfolio is suitely balanced with a few gaps here and there?

    Besides, another way to look at the imposed 'credit folly' is to view it as an excellent opportunity to cater for new, emerging and important trends. Life ain't gonna stop because a few influential people in the finance sector can't or didn't want to add up. (My take on that is that it was probably common knowledge in the sector hence it's informally managed and massaged step-by-step infliction on society.)

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Andrew Martin

    Twunt

  14. James O'Shea
    Jobs Halo

    re andrew martin

    " as long as I didn't have to pay my own money for its over-priced shiney hardware"

    You _should_ know that a Mac Pro costs $1100 _less_ than a similarly configured Dell T5400. (A Mac Pro ships with _two_ quad-core Xeons for $2800, a T5400 ships with _one_ quad-core Xeon for $2400, you can add a second for another $1100. You also need to crank the hard drive slightly to bring it up to Mac Pro level, and to add FireWire 800.)

    " as long as I'm allowed to install Vista on it"

    I have Vista installed on the iMac I'm typing this message on. It's not difficult. Apple supplies Boot Camp with the OS, and you can partition the drive and have Windows (XP or Vista) on one partition and OS X on the other. If you get VMWare or Parallels you can run Vista or XP in a window while running OS X, or you can boot over to Vista or XP.

    "and if only it came with a keyboard where the keys are in the right places"

    The keyboard it shipped with have the keys in the right places so long as I'm concerned. If you don't like that keyboard, then Microsoft makes a perfectly adequate keyboard. Use about $50 of the $1100 you saved by buying a Mac Pro instead of a T5400 and buy a Microsoft, or a Logitech, or any of dozens of other keyboards which will work without a problem.

    It appears that you'll be buying a Mac Pro soon.

  15. James O'Shea

    re ac 20 feb 11:59

    He's merely ignorant. Ignorance can be cured.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ P. Lee

    "I'm eagerly waiting to see KDE 4.2 stabilise further. It is much improved over 4.0 but I'd like to see the gui be as stable as the OS underneath it. It certainly now compares (favourably) with Aqua for prettiness and features. I've long held that KDE has the best infrastructure but Gnome has the applications. Hopefully with 4.2 onwards, with akonadi and so on, the case for having native KDE versions of firefox, openoffice etc will become compelling."

    This is why people wanting something that doesnt look like a windows pc will go buy a mac. Too many choices in linux and too much stuff that just doesnt work. Funnily enough right from the beginning, apple managed to produce a unix like os and wrap it in a usable interface. So why cant linux distributions do it? Too busy writing yet another distibution that will take over the world maybe?

  17. B

    I'll admit the Register seems to be baiting for hits . . .

    . . . and I appear to be contributing to them. I eagerly look at the headlines looking for any article related to Apple just to see how it will be twisted against Apple by the "journalist" (does that title have ANY meaning any more?). This one didn't disappoint. After being forced to admit that Apple tops the customer satisfaction surveys (for several years in a row I might add) the author then deviates slightly and begins to fabricate how these numbers don't REALLY count because Apple buyers are more likely to be shallow snobs who are over enthusiastic and PC users just bought a computing device.

    Bravo! You didn't disappoint. No matter what the news I can count on el Reg to apply a different standard to Apple as opposed to other vendors. Apple is not perfect by any stretch, but to try and explain away the results by discounting the replies of those who bought Apple products is a pretty slimy form of "journalism". Are Karl Rove and George Bush running the propaganda department at the Reg now? Is the hope that if you keep repeating a lie long enough it will eventually be truth?

    So, in conclusion, I'll be back again tomorrow to read the latest propaganda. I'll admit, I'm hooked on how you manage to spin your anti-Apple bias.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Idiotic Reg comment, once again

    Quote: "A consumer who regards a purchase as a reflection his or her own personal stylishness, hipness, or up-to-the-minute design savvy may be more apt to be satisfied with their choice than one who's merely buying a computing appliance.

    And an argument can be made that a not-insignificant number of Apple iMac and MacBook purchasers may fall into that category."

    ...or you could be blowing unsubstantiated bullshit out of your arse as is typical of the reportage around here. Do you honestly think that the vast majority of Mac buyers give a flying fuck about their supposed 'hipness'? You are fucking deluding yourself with that bollocks.

    Anyway, there are very obvious reasons why Mac users are more satisfied with their purchases:

    1. The OS isn't a sub-par experience like Windows.

    2. The software that comes with the computer is top notch.

    3. When put together, 1. and 2. make using the Mac an *enjoyable* experience from the start.

    4. The Mac community is incredibly supportive.

    Regardless of that, this is not actually very relevant at all to the results of this survey, whereas the next simple fact is: Mac users pay more for their computer. That is it. That explains more than anything else you can pull out of your behind in your article.

    On the whole the result is that Mac owners get a bloody decent computer with good to excellent build-quality. In addition it is something that is very well-designed for its intended market. In contrast, PC manufacturers, as well as making some well-built, well-designed computers, churn out an huge amount of cheap junk and it is these cheap junk PCs that make up the bulk of their sales. Satisfaction when that PC inevitably proves to be - shock, horror - a cheap piece of junk is never, ever going to be high. You get exactly what you pay for and sub-£400 PC just isn't going to give you a good computer no matter what buzz-word busting jargon is used to sell it. Mac users are more satisfied because they get what they pay for - a much superior experience relative to a cheap POS. Likewise, high-end PC buyers will also be more satisfied because they too get what they pay for - a superior experience to a cheap POS. Cheap POS PC buyers are likely to be much less satisfied because it'll be far more likely to be slow and/or prone to failure. It is also likely that it will receive completely unsatisfactory support from cut-throat retailers unwilling to spend anything on staff capable of actually helping. The problem for PC manufacturers when it comes to a survey like this is that the cheap bastards far, far, far outnumber the high-end purchasers. They could get 100% satisfaction ratings from the high-end users, yet still end up with 50% overall.

    It isn't fucking rocket science.

  19. B
    Thumb Up

    TESTIFY AC!!

    Sorry, I was so overwhelmed with your "you get what you pay for" logic that I went into spontaneous cheering. It seems "journalists" have forgotten that when you are a cheap piece of shiit3 and you buy a cheap piece of shiit3 then, inevitably, your experience is that your cheap piece of shiit3 is a cheap piece of shiit3!! And your response is to ask yourself what cheap piece of shiit3 sold me this cheap piece of shiit3!?

    I know I paraphrased your response, but your analysis was right on the money.

  20. Rolf Howarth
    Thumb Up

    @Andrew Martin

    ... as long as I didn't have to pay my own money for its over-priced shiney hardware

    I don't :-)

    ... as long as I'm allowed to install Vista on it

    You are

    ... and if only it came with a keyboard where the keys are in the right places.

    They are. They're basically in the same place as an American keyboard. (And trust me, if you ever spend a year being forced to use a French AZERTY keyboard but manage to persuade your employer to let you load the US keyboard drivers you too will learn to love that layout!). Why the British arbitrarily decided to move all the keys around 30 years ago I will never know, presumably because the Americans had computers then and we still had typewriters and we'd never heard of things like backslash and tilde.

    Incidentally, it's a lot easier to generate keystrokes for any missing characters on a Mac keyboard than it is on Windows. I know alt-U will give me an umlaut, alt-E an acute accent, alt-3 a hash character, and so on - all very intuitive shortcuts - but even after 20 years of using Windows I still don't know how to type café on an English PC keyboard!

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Another Survey I See

    Has anyone ever heard of the source of this survey? How do we know this is not all made up?

    I mean "Hooray for Apple" and all that --- but still......................................

  22. Ivan Headache

    Ease of use

    I had a call from an elderly lady last week. She was thinking about buying a computer as she had been taking lessons at the local adult education centre. As she was retired and no-longer had a secretary, she now had to do all her own writing instead of giving dictation.

    She had spoken to some friends at her club (a husband & wife, 1 Mac & 1 PC vista) and on the strength of their arguments decided to look at a mac.

    I met her at the local Apple store and showed her what was what, and asked her what she had been using at the AEC. Windows XP on some generic box.

    When I get a situation like this I tend to advise the prospect to consider what they are familiar with and how easy they find it in use.

    This morning she phoned to say that Apple had just delivered her Macbook Pro.

  23. Vincent Manis

    Macs are for creative folks

    I'm always intrigued by the notion that somehow Macs are for creative people, but PCs are for serious people. Maybe that was true back in the days when desktop publishing was new, but nowadays, pretty much anything you can do on OS X can be done on Windows, and vice versa. Here's why I love my 3-year old MacBook Pro.

    1. Magsafe power plug. Very little chance of destroying a computer, as I once did to a Dell Latitude laptop where the power cable ended up inextricably tied around my foot just I stood up abruptly. Those little tiny touches do make a difference.

    2. It's real Unix, so I can run computer science-y software that was written for Unix.

    3. It really is plug-and-go. I have a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it, and while it's a nice system, I had to do a lot of work to get everything working properly on it.

    4. My antivirus software for that machine consumes zero bytes, takes 0% of the cpu cycles, and cost me $0.

    5. Apple includes their development software at no cost with every system.

    6. Apple's development software does not suggest that I become super-user in order to compile, test, and debug software. Visual Studio did exactly that on Vista, maybe it won't on Windows 7.

    Not one of these is something that Apple's competitors couldn't duplicate (they'd have to license the magsafe patents, I guess, but they could apply the same attention to detail about other aspects of how people actually use machines).

    Windows systems fail on all six of these criteria. Unix/Linux systems pass on 2, 4, 5, and 6, but fail on 1 and 3. (Incidentally, I know my way around Unix, having started in 1975 on a Unix V7 system. Even so, when I want to send email, or write software, the last thing I want to be doing is to fiddle with system parameters to make everything work, and yes, I have had to do that with every system I have ever installed Linux on).

    So my point is, Microsoft, the hardware vendors, and the Unix/Linux community COULD be competing with Apple. The criteria I listed here happen to be mine; other folks have their own, though `it just works' should be on everyone's. Where people miss the boat is to say `Oh, we aren't Apple, we do it our way'. Apple definitely has their failures, but their successes come from building things that satisfy needs (not just status) in people's lives. Other companies could do the same.

    By the way, let me put in a plug for Mark Shuttleworth's goal of making Ubuntu compete with OS X. I don't know if they'll be successful, but they are definitely thinking the right way.

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