I was reading through a great posting on Engadget about a recent 3-year study of Laptop reliability. While I question whether the study’s data source is a true representation of the market, the data does provide some interesting insights as to what we can expect when we purchase laptop hardware. Here is the quick rundown:
- One in Three laptops fail over 3 years. Ouch!
- Netbooks (devices under $400) fail 20 percent more often than laptops. Double-ouch!
- Asus was the reliability winner, with less than 16% failure rate over 3 years.
- Acer, Gateway, and HP were the worst in reliability, with more than 23% failure rates (HP more than 25%).
This got me thinking as to whether I could find documentation on the failure rates of other popular electronics. I found another paper from Squaretrade (the same source for the Engadget article above) concerning Game Consoles:
- Xbox 360 has a failure rate of over 23% over 2 years (with PS3 and Wii at 10% and 2.7% respectively).
- Over half the Xbox 360 failures were due to RROD (Red Ring Of Death) failures. As such, if this issue were to be resolved by Microsoft, the Xbox 360 would be on-par with the PS3.
- Even if you take usage data into account, the Wii is least likely to fail.
Maybe that extended warranty doesn’t sound like such a bad option when purchasing gadgets…
What’s been your experience with failure rates on your hardware? My personal laptop only went 6 months before the bluetooth chip on it died, but I’ve had my xbox for about a year now and no RROD (knock on wood)!
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