dell

The quality of Apple's tech support by telephone "declined significantly" from 2010 to 2011 according to a new customer study.

Vocal Laboratories (Vocalabs) this morning published findings from its National Customer Service Survey, saying that while Apple continued to beat out competitors like Dell and HP when it came to customer service on the phone, customer satisfaction dropped a full 10 percent since the firm surveyed customers in the first half of 2010.

The study, which ran from May 2008 to December 2011 was based on 4,852 telephone interviews made following calls to the support lines … Read more

I didn't get how important support was. Then, recently, I had back-to-back experiences dealing with both great and terrible support for products that failed. If you make a consumer product, there are important lessons in these experiences.

Experience number 1: Dell

I bought a cheap computer for my mother, for her birthday. A few months later, but still during the warranty period, it died. Utterly. Power supply, I think, although maybe the motherboard. I started the support process, eventually did a frustrating online chat (we've all been there, right?), and against my wishes agreed to have a Dell … Read more

Dell has hired John Swainson, former CEO of CA, as president of its new software group.

Reporting directly to Dell CEO Michael Dell, Swainson will lead the new group with a mission to sell products and services to large enterprises as the company continues to expand beyond the PC business.

Dubbed CA's Mr. Fix-It in a CNET story from 2005, Swainson has been credited with turning around and expanding his former company, a talent Dell undoubtedly hopes he can bring to his new position.

The new software group is aimed at helping Dell in its ongoing goal to sell … Read more

Apple is out-shipping traditional PC vendors by a wide margin on the back of strong iPad sales, a marketing research firm has found.

In the fourth quarter, Apple became the leading worldwide client PC vendor by shipping more than 15 million iPads and 5 million Macs, representing 17 percent of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally in the fourth quarter, according to Canalys.

Hewlett-Packard was a distant No. 2 with about 12.7 percent.

"We're going through the biggest shift the PC industry has seen in 20 years. It's very difficult to grow in the … Read more

It's not every year that laptops take center stage (or even close to it) at CES. But in 2012, a combination of ultrabook hype and inventive product designs combined to make portable computers the most interesting category of the show.

A few weeks back, during CES, we shot the second version of what we're now calling the Laptop Talk Show. The show was streamed live online, and shot in front of a live audience, but has not been made available for on-demand viewing until now. This year's version features myself, Scott Stein, and Molly Wood going over … Read more

I'm not really sure who uses a business laptop. Now that ultrabooks are here and spreading, I'm even less sure.

Case in point: the HP Folio 13.

Here at the CNET offices, I've seen more and more people asking (and hoping) for MacBook Airs. Apple's never had a problem with differentiating between business and personal computers: It simply make products, period. Our IT department allows Apple computers, but they're not technically business laptops. No one seems to mind.

On the Windows side of things, there's been a bit of a divide between some business-targeted laptops--some with crypto-enabled TPM, or Trusted Platform Module chips, others with Intel's vPro technology--and "consumer" computers. That divide is old-fashioned. … Read more

Alienware looks poised to launch an affordable gaming desktop.

The PC maker itself has been promoting the reveal on its Alienware Arena Web site. You may also have seen a promotional video around the Web.

Digging further, if you head over to Alienware's Facebook page, you'll find a reference to an Alienware Andromeda system in the comments of this post. Googling "Alienware Andromeda" turns up preorder listings at various online retailers for a system with a 3.8GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive for just over $1,000. Sounds … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The biggest surprise of CES 2012 is not what we've seen here at the show, but what we haven't. In a radical departure from previous years, several major laptop makers are missing in action, while others are showing off only a single major new product, if anything.

Instead of hosting its usual giant press conference and hotel suites full of products to demo, Dell instead introduced a single laptop, the XPS 13 ultrabook. If it was going to highlight just one laptop, Dell certainly picked the most relevant one, but last year's CES saw several systems across different categories.

Dell's sister brand, Alienware, had nothing new to show, despite scoring big at past CES events with systems such as the M11X.

HP likewise stuck to a single major new laptop, the Envy 14 Spectre. It's an innovative system with a cool design (and our Best of CES winner in the computers and hardware category), but HP's other new laptops, the revamped Envy 15 and Envy 17, and the Folio 13 ultrabook, had already been released last month.

Toshiba typically has new models spilling from its various Satellite, Qosmio, and Portege laptop lines. But at CES 2012, it only had a single product to show off, an unnamed 14-inch ultrabook prototype. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--It's a rare CES for which most of the digital ink spilled is about computers and hardware, rather than giant televisions. But 2012 was just such a year, thanks to the never-ending drumbeat of Intel's ultrabook platform.

Yes, ultrabooks again It seems like you couldn't walk more than a hundred steps across the velvety carpet of the CES show floor without running into a giant ULTRABOOK or WINDOWS 8 sign. The first official ultrabook-designated laptops (it's an Intel marketing term) arrived during the 2011 holiday season, but CES 2012 was a coming-out party for a host of new designs from nearly all manufacturers.

The laptops ranged from the diminutive (the Acer Aspire S5) to the large and bold (the HP Envy 14 Spectre), and to the copycat (the MacBook-Air-alike Dell XPS 13). And 14- and 15-inch models, some with optical drives, dedicated graphics, and hybrid solid-state/hard drives, have begun to blur a category only in its nascency, leading us to ask if the category will suffer from unnecessary mission creep.

Will that mean that consumers will have a hard time identifying what an ultrabook is, or even feel the category has become overhyped and overexposed by the end of this year? Ultrabooks may be the industry's next great hope, judging by Intel's ultrabook-obsessed keynote presentation, but that doesn't mean consumers are never going to want anything different.

But not just ultrabooks Only a handful of other, non-ultrabook laptops really stood out.… Read more