Dell dead last in reliability!

Check out this report on computer reliability by manufacturer:
Report: Asus Has 'Off the Charts' Reliability Score
Dell comes up dead last in reliability out of the 9 mentioned manufacturers. That's pretty bad.

I've wanted to say this in some if the other threads where people are bashing the ones who have had to have a defective system replaced and try to get some extra compensation out if it:

Dell isn't exactly some innocent party here, being taken advantage of by unscrupulous jackals. Dell chooses this shady business model of pumping out a shoddy product and making more off of the ones that take it than they lose on the ones that demand replacements until the flaws are all fixed.

With that said I'm happy enough with my system after one motherboard swap that I can wait until a refresh of the 1645 line before I continue with service calls to fix the broken card reader, backlight brightness that won't change, random freeze/crashes, still persistent throttling, and whatever else crops up in the mean time. That way I can get a newer model when they offer a replacement system. And I won't feel one bit guilty pushing for nice upgrades as compensation for the hassle of not getting a laptop that just works right. Dell brought it upon themselves with their shoddy workmanship.

 

Actually, I think you could look at those statistics and come to a wide variety of conclusions, and many of those would be very different from the conclusion to which you have come.

All 9 manufacturers in the list, including Dell, have a smaller % of service calls than their share in the market. Even though Dell is 9th on that list, they only have 14.5% of the service calls even though they have 23.8% of the market share. It would appear, therefore, that all 9 of those manufacturers have less than their expected share of repairs and that all 9 have high reliability. Further, it would appear that the bulk of poor reliability falls with computers from manufacturers other than those 9. Even though other manufacturers have only about 10% of the total market share, they account for about 65% of all the service calls.

The truth probably is that those statistics have very little meaning. As the text points out, there is no consideration for how many users are making service calls to the manufacturer's own support services. It also does not take into consideration how many people are fixing their own problems or how many are replacing computers, instead of having them repaired. I would not be surprised, for example, if Dell, with its broad market share, doesn't have a larger percentage of customers who have limited tech savvy and who need to rely on others to deal with issues while a company like ASUS could well have more tech savvy customers who are able to resolve their own issues.

The bottom line is that, regardless of whether Dell makes good or poor products, there are too many variables at play and those statistics are quite meaningless except for those who want to use them as their basis for venting against Dell. Also, the title of your post is quite misleading because there is nothing in the data or article to indicate that, as the title would imply, Dell is "dead last" in reliability. It would be at least as accurate to say that the stats show that, of the many dozens of manufacturers of computers, Dell is in the top 9 in terms of reliability.

 

That data is more than a bit flawed. It's based solely on how many people called 1-800-recsuepc for service (have you even ever heard of 1-800-rescuepc, I haven't), and doesn't take into consideration service received from the manufacturer or manufacturer contracted warranty support.

BTW, this same report (with near same results) was released the last few years, so this is nothing new. People argued about it last year too.

 

This report is a joke.

 

This thread is just another Dell bashing thread.

I agree with everyone here but the OP. This report is obvioulsy flawed, I really can't believe he posted it.

Let's say Dell sold 1,000,000 laptops a year. That would mean that 145,000 people are having problems with there laptops. Dell would not be in business if that was the case.

 

Actually, it doesn't say that. It doesn't say that there were service calls for 14.5% of Dell laptops. It says that 14.5% of the service calls were for Dell laptops, but, as I said above, 23.8% of all laptops sold were Dell laptops. Thus, the calls for service on Dell laptops were at a significantly lower level than would be expected.

I do agree, however, that for a multitude of reasons, the study is flawed and the data has absolutely no value.

 

Ok I hear you. You right. LOL out of all manufacturers dell had 14.5% of all service calls. I misread the report and figured that dell had 14.5% complaints just on there own units.

I stand corrected.

rep for you

 

Out of curiosity, I took the same statistics and wanted to see what happened if they were presented differently. Instead of the way that they were presented, I figured the total percentage of repairs for each manufacturer as a percentage of what you would expect based on the market share of each manufacturer.

This is what it would look like:

Asus 6%
Apple 14%
IBM 18%
Toshiba 27%
HP/Compaq 36%
Sony 38 %
Acer 46%
Samsung 57%
Dell 61%
Total for all others 384%

Even though the order is still the same, since any number under 100% indicates fewer than would be expected repairs, what the data shows, if anything, is that all 9 of these manufacturers are doing better than average with regard to reliability. What it also would show is how far these 9 are ahead of all the other manufacturers because the total for all of the others is 384%, which means that their computers need almost 4 times as many repairs as you would expect based on their market share.

Besides the fact that the data is flawed in many ways, even the way it is presented doesn't accurately show how well all nine of these manufacturers are doing with regard to reliability compared to the industry as a whole.

 

It also doesn't reflect the fact that the 'all other' small little known brands generally don't offer much in the way of technical and service support, hence the increased amount of support calls to a third-party provider.

 

Your absolutely right and if the data is properly presented then Dell woud have bigger numbers as they and HP both have the largest share in the market so it would be obvious that they would have higher repair numbers. In reality it's all relative. Asus had great number but had very small market share too and as one other member wrote, Asus probably targets user who are way more familair with computers then aot of dell customers are. Also that report does not state what kind of support was needed etc. For all we know it could be someone who is not familair with a computer asking how to do something in word etc. It really is not a good report and should not be used to pass judgement on Dell, HP or even Asus for that matter.

 

Related to that, I'd guess that Dell, because of its size, has a high number of contracts with places like schools, and I'd also guess the children in those schools are more likely than individual users to be doing something to mess up their computers. Further, since the report only considers repair calls to one company, it is unlikely that their customers represent all of the manufacturers in the same percentages that match overall market share. Again, since Dell has such a large penetration of computers in the institutional market and since I'd guess that Ruscuecom has a large number of contracts with large institutions, those factors make it much more likely that they would be doing repairs on Dell computers.

Since all of the mass manufacturer's are using the same components from the same sources, I'd be surprised if there was any significant real difference at all between the real repair rates from any of those mass manufacturers. I would have similar levels of confidence in buying a product from any of them, and my choice of manufacturers would be based on design, features, and the price points at which they are providing those features.

Also, I did a quick Google search on laptop reliability. In each of the first three studies I found, Dell was somewhere in the middle to a bit above the middle of the pack. The data in the study in question in this thread is, in fact, so laughably meaningless that I'm embarrassed to admit that I've even paid a few minutes worth of attention to it.

 

That data is flawed and when you give it to idiots like the OP its bound to be interpreted according to whatever pre-concieved notions he has about Dell.

 

95% of all statistics you read on the internet have flawed data. :tongue:
The arguments about the data being flawed because it doesn't account for market share are wrong. The third column, "Computer Reliability Score", does just that; it factors in market share. And Dell is still last (out of all of the major manufacturers.) No data is flawed as long as it is accurate; it may simply need a more comprehensive analysis to fully reveal its meanings.

My reason for starting this thread was to address the people in other threads suggesting that the people getting their faulty systems exchanged should be happy with just the exact same system back, as if their time and frustration in having to deal with all of the issues, service calls, and exchanges is worth nothing. This is my first Dell after a long line of thinkpads and the difference in quality and reliability is blatant.

I don't much appreciate the guy who called me an idiot, but I'll bite my lip. It's just one of those typical mindless remarks from a jump-on-the-bandwagon-and-attack-the-OP-because-they-wanna-belong-and-that's-the-direction-of-the-thread kind of person. I'd wager I know a good deal more than him/her about statistical analysis, anyways.

 

No, that is not correct. The column that is headed "computer reliability score" is nothing more than some arbitrary base number for all the manufacturers multiplied by the inverse of the per cent of repair calls for that manufacturer. It is based on no additional information and provides no additional information than the column that provides the per cent of repair calls. The second and third columns provide exactly the same information, just in a different format. And the data in both of those columns is, therefore, flawed for the exact same reasons.


I do, however, support your displeasure about the lack of civility in at least one reply, but that doesn't make your conclusion any more accurate than it otherwise is.

 

"These reports are calculated in a simple and straight forward manner: the number of computers an individual manufacturer ships (and therefore its market share) is weighed against the number of calls Rescuecom’s computer repair specialists receive for that same manufacturer."

This suggests to me that market share is factored into the "computer reliability score". A quick check with a calculator verifies that the "score" is, indeed, a function of both rescuecom repair data AND market share.

Actually, here's the data graphed. See the straight line you get when graphing the value for market share/rescuecom versus "score"? That means they're directly related, and hence market share is accounted for.

 

Regardless of how it was calculated, the figures mean nothing. They're compiled by a very shady firm (just google them), based solely on total calls to their support center. It doesn't matter what they called about, maybe grandma couldn't figure out how to log on to her e-mail, and it was easier for her to remember 1-800-rescuepc than whatever the Dell support number is.

More importantly, they don't take into account any service provided by the manufacturers themselves, so it's likely that a significant portion of their calls are for out-of-warranty systems, from stupid people, or from institutions that buy large quantity's of support-free systems and contract out their tech support. This is not in the least bit indicative of the quality of the systems themselves.

 

Factoring in the total market share with the number of calls to Rescuecom is, I think, what I did in a post on page 1 of this thread.

But the fact still remains that the "number of calls to Rescuecom's call center" is statistically valid in no way. Unless the total of all the Rescuecom customer base represents an accurate sample, by manufacturer, of the total number of laptops sold, regardless of what you multiply it by, you end up with a number that means nothing. And for numerous reasons stated by many in this thread, it is very unlikely that Rescuecom's customer base is a representative sample of all laptops sold. Again, when the base data that you are starting with has no validity, no matter what you do with that data, you are still not going to end up with an meaningful result.

I'll give one more example of why their sample is unlikely to be representative. The Dell computer that I'm using is much less likely than a computer that is in, say, a school, to need repair. When I worked in a school, on any given day, I'd guess that 5% of the computers needed some sort of repair. Add to that the fact that Rescuecom is likely to have contracts with schools, a high percentage of which have Dell computers, and they are not likely to ever do any business with people like me. If they are working with the most vulnerable computers and if the largest percentage of those computers are likely to be Dell computers, it isn't a big jump to see that any analysis they do of their repair stats is going to start with a bias against Dell.

In any case, you are welcome to make anything you want out of those statistics. If they tell you that you shouldn't do business with Dell, that is fine. They tell me nothing, and I will continue to make buying decisions on factors other than very questionable data.

 

...And if you go by results posted by companies you can have quite different results. E.g. SquareTrade last year placed Dell right behind Apple making them the fifth most reliable (ahead of Acer, Gateway, Lenovo, and HP)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/laptop-reliability-survey-asus-and-toshiba-win-hp-fails/

The RESCUECOM statistics don't seem to even mention the ages of the machines being repaired.

 

Who the hell is Rescuecom and why would we care how many support calls they get? Dell takes care of it's own warranty and support. Tom's Hardware once again delivers a completely useless article.

 

I dont care about belonging buddy. I'm callling it like i see it.