SquareTrade, proprietors of extended warranties, just released a 3-year study that sheds some light on the reliability of laptops and netbooks. The main conclusion that 1 in 3 notebooks fail within three year should come as no surprise. After all, they are portable computers that get banged around. It’s the nature of the beast. However, the study does reveal some other interesting tid-bits, including a handy graph the shows the malfunction rate of the top nine laptop manufacturers.
Feel free to read the whole study here, but here are the main points.
- 31% of notebooks suffer a total failure rate before 3 years
- Netbooks fail 20% more often than laptops
- 5.8% of netbooks malfunction within the first 12 months
- Asus has the best 3-year malfunction rate at 15.6%
- HP has the worst 3-year malfunction rate at 25.6%
- You might want a warranty