Apple Laptop Reliability Survey

Nikopol writes "The venerable Macintouch site recently released the results and analysis of a survey on Apple laptop reliability." From the article: "Our survey spanned every laptop capable of running Mac OS X, encompassing 41 models sold over seven and a half years. A challenge in ascertaining the reliability of any device is that more time gives them more opportunity to break, so new devices should always look more reliable at first glance. Our survey asked participants when their laptop first needed a repair -- 'first year', 'second or third year', and 'fourth year or later.' These correspond to the duration of Apple's standard one-year warranty, the AppleCare extended warranty program, and any repairs that might happen outside any warranty coverage period. We also asked participants if they purchased AppleCare for their laptop."

Comments

Re:self-selected study

[gwernol]

As much as people like to quote the macintouch surveys, they are still self-selected unverified Internet studies. As such, they are not useful for any real-world decision making, any more than Slashdot polls.

Macintouch claims that this is not a problem, but they have no way to support that claim.

I completely agree. This is a meaningless poll, something I've written to Ric Ford about a couple of times, without reply. The Macintouch folks don't seem to understand how to conduct a meaningful survey and don't seem to care that their results are likely misleading. To be accurate, we have no way of knowing if their result are meaningful or not, since they have no way of measuring the biases in their sampling.

A pity this kind of nonsense is published by Macintouch and an equal pity that a site that claims to be "news for nerds" propagates an unscientific poll like this.