PC Magazine - 2009 11.pdf - Libertad Zero

DesktopsREADERS’ CHOICEApple John Hodgman’s campaign againstthe Mac continues to be a losing battle, atleast among the readers of PC Mag, whofor the umpteenth year in a row gave Applehigh marks.Sony Sony’s media-centric line of desktopsare the favorites among the Windowsbasedcomputers in our survey, despite asmall market share.When it comes to the overallsatisfaction users have withtheir computers, Appleonce again reigns supreme.The company’s Macintosh PCs—which wecan all state unequivocally are actually WindowsPCs too, if you want them to be—haveconsistently proven to be favorites amongPC Mag readers. Apple’s significantly betterthan average (SBA) overall score (9.1 outof 10) marks it as a clear Readers’ Choice.The company moved up significantly inscores for tech support since last year, too(8.6 SBA, up from 8.1). It suffered a little inthat more of its desktop computers neededrepairs this year (12 percent, instead of the9 percent needing repair in 2008), and thelikelihood of someone recommending a Macto a friend dropped slightly to a score of 9.2SBA. Still, these are very high marks.Even though we can call Apple computers“Windows machines” since they’re poweredby the same Intel chips (and can runthe same operating system), we still averagethe Windows-only system vendors separately,since consumers view the two OSsin such different light. And in the world ofWindows vendors, not much has changedsince 2008, when the average overall scorewas 7.6. The same goes for this year.That number held steady in part becauseof a nice showing this year by Sony. In fact,Sony almost didn’t make the final results in2009, as a lower number of responses overallled to one-third as many Sony desktopowners participating in our survey. However,Sony owners who did respond are prettyhappy with their VAIOs. Sony is the secondReaders’ Choice vendor, with a better thanaverage (BA) overall score of 8.2 this year—that’s half a point higher than the nearestWindows PC manufacturer, indicating satisfactionindeed. The company dropped thepercentage of its desktops needing repairsby half (from 14 percent to 7 percent) fromlast year as well. Sony’s likelihood of receiv-HOW TO READ THE TABLES Overall scores are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they arebased on reader answers to the question “Overall, how would you rate this product?” All scores not representedas a percentage (%) are on a scale of 1 to 10, in which 10 is best. A dash in a table indicates that we do not haveenough survey data to give the company a score in that column.We use a t-test measure on each score against the average of all the scores and determine whether they aresignificantly different at a 95 percent confidence level. The t-test helps calculate the confidence interval for eachscore—the range in which we are 95 percent certain that the score is representative. If the score is more than oneconfidence interval above or below the average, we state that it is better than or worse than this average. Formore than two confidence intervals, we say that the score is significantly better or worse.50 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION NOVEMBER 2009