APPLE CORE News Feature
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How reliable is your MacBook? Compared to Windows laptops, there can be only one winner written by ALEX BLAKE quickly. In fact, they also failed far less in the first year of use – around 3% compared to 10% of Windows portables.
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14 | MACFORMAT | february 2016
What’s the catch?
The MacBook Pro fared only a little worse than the Air for reliability.
This was no close-run thing – Apple obliterated the competition
Newer MacBooks use fewer parts, which means fewer points of failure.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to look a little closer at the results. One key difference between Apple and its PC rivals is that Tim Cook’s company has its own range of retail stores. Could it be that what is deemed a laptop ‘failure’ in other brands – like sending off the device to the manufacturer for repair – is not recorded as such with MacBooks because they can simply be repaired at an Apple Store? Not according to James McQueen of Consumer Reports. He told MacFormat that “a ‘failure’ was counted if a respondent’s laptop [either] experienced a breakdown that was ‘catastrophic’ – the laptop stopped working or was not usable – or ‘serious’ – the laptop still worked, but poorly”. Additionally, a ‘failure’ was also recorded if the laptop “had any of its original components repaired or replaced because they were broken”. Both of those criteria would cover taking your MacBook to an Apple Store for repair. The discrepancy between MacBook repair rates and those of other laptops lay not in the way that they were reported, but rather
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hree simple words have become something of a rallying cry among Apple users, a mini manifesto for our favourite devices: “It just works”. Collectively they’re a mission statement for products that are built to last. An ethos captured in 13 characters. So when Consumer Reports surveyed 58,000 American laptop users about their computers’ reliability, it was no surprise to see Apple’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro sitting pretty at the top of the pile. However, this was no close-run thing, no photo finish – Apple obliterated the competition. Between 2010 and 2015 (the period of the survey), the MacBook Air had an estimated failure rate of just 7%, and the MacBook Pro was hot on its heels at 9%. In contrast, the failure rate of the most reliable Windows laptop was almost double that of the Air – the Gateway NV range, which failed at a rate of 13%. The positive feedback didn’t stop there. The Consumer Reports survey also highlights that Apple customers use their MacBooks longer than their Windows counterparts use their laptops – typically 23 hours a week as opposed to 20. That further reinforces the news about failure rates because the extra workload doesn’t cause them to wear out