Apple blew away its PC industry peers in this year's American Customer Satisfaction Index, perhaps because it was the only company that did not release a Windows Vista PC.
The University of Michigan released its annual ACSI scores Tuesday for the PC industry, and Apple took top honors for the fifth straight year. Apple was the only company in the PC industry other than Dell to post an increase in customer satisfaction in 2008 compared to last year, said Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI.
The ACSI scores measure a consumer's overall satisfaction with a company, which includes product quality, value, customer service, and essentially anything else that impresses or annoys a customer of a particular company. Apple scored an 85 on the index, its highest score ever and a full ten points higher than second place finisher Dell.
Fornell attributed Apple's score to the clear success the Mac has had among the U.S. public, but also pointed out that dissatisfaction with Windows Vista might have hurt the scores for the other companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and Gateway. HP, the market leader in PCs, is measured by its two PC brands--HP and Compaq--and both brands saw about 4 percent drops in satisfaction compared to last year.
The scores were assembled during the second quarter through thousands of interviews, and so therefore do not reflect the launch of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe, two black eyes for Apple's customer service this year. Fornell said he would expect Apple's score to level off next year in any event, as "we have never seen a gap between the leader and the rest of the pack this big. If we are correct in that it has something to do with the launch of Vista, the other guys will of course correct that and come back a little bit."
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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This is idiotic
I've used both MaC (Macintosh's Crap) and Windows {ME (Superb), XP (beyond excellence), and VISTA (the ultimate GOD). When XP was launched after 98 & ME these apple jerks launched a news that XP had possibly 'failed', and later it turned out that people couldn't survive without XP, and the same is going to repeat all over again with Vista. Good Luck tryin' to trick some more clients. People who are considering buying a new system, I would recommend that you give a shot to Vista which is by far the best OS ever! I'm a writer and a gaming fanatic and have found the security, gaming, graphics, and system performance superbly enhanced as compared to Mac's OS'. And if they think they can beat Microsoft or even HP, they are out of their minds, the only way Apple can win this war is if it Preloads windows on their systems. And please stop trying to copy Windows outdated versions, considering you can't even do that! Your latest OS can't even compete with Win ME!! :))
Posted by Maxwell Cornwallis on Sunday, December 28 2008 04:05 AM