A scorecard from a US computer repair firm saw Apple's reliablility dropping in the face of competition from Asus and Lenovo.
RescueCom awarded points to computer manufacturers based on the 15,000 support calls it received in the fourth quarter of last year. Apple had a score of 324 points, Lenovo had a score of 348 points and Asus stomped both companies with 972 points, Register Hardware reports.
The scores take market share into account, comparing how many calls RescueCom received for each manufacturer to how many of their computers are on the market. Though Apple's market share was the largest of the three manufacturers, at 6.8 percent compared to 1.6 percent for Asus, 6.8 of RescueCom's support calls were regarding Apple and only 0.2 percent were for Asus.
Still, the huge disparity between Asus and the other manufacturers had much to do with a huge spike in Asus Eee PC 1000 sales at the end of the year. Those new purchases probably didn't require much support off the bat, so for that reason, RescueCom declared Lenovo as the joint winner in Q4, with Apple coming in second.
There are a couple flaws with these reports. RescueCom's statistics don't factor in the nature of each call, so conceivably, a call about someone's computer dying would count the same as a minor glitch. Also, because RescueCom is a third-party support company, there's no telling how these numbers compare to the manufacturers' own volume of support calls.
In any case, Apple was still king of 2008 overall, repeating the same feat from 2007. In the last quarter of 2008, HP was the worst, accounting for 17.9 percent of RescueCom's support calls.
