Laptop Mag: Apple Has Best Tech Support
Apple ranks at the top, Dell slumps at the bottom of tech support.
While many of you Tom's Hardware readers are usually savvy enough to troubleshoot problems on your own, even if it's store-bought computer, many consumers out there heavily factor into their purchases in the quality of tech support.
Most research into tech support quality finds that the large computer makers Dell and HP rank near the bottom, while Apple consistently scores at the top. Laptop Magazine today published its report after conducting its independent tests on Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Sony and Toshiba.
Laptop Magazine tested the computer makers by making two phone calls to each company's tech support lines, both times asking how to alter power management schemes and how to enable an external monitor.
Apple scored top marks with its North American-based tech support workers, well put-together website and availability of the Genius Bar. Lenovo, Sony and Toshiba also did well with knowledgeable phone support.
The worst of the bunch were Acer, Dell and HP, which was plagued with long hold times and/or tech help that wasn't very helpful at all.

There's a huge difference between Apple users and regular PC users.
Hmm.
There's a huge difference between Apple users and regular PC users.
Their tech support is AWFUL. We paid for expedited shipping of leopard recovery discs (next day) and after 4 days we STILL didn't have it. We then had to wait another 2 days to finally get them.
There are so many other stories about how bad their customer service is that I have don't have room to list it all here.
The guy I talked to (had an Indian accent) walked me through troubleshooting finally coming down to "Lets send it in" DELL shipped me an empty box, I dropped the laptop in, applied prepaid shipping sticker, called DHP, they came to my door and picked it up. Six weeks later I had it back and have had zero problems hardware wise since.
I sorted of gave up and took the once for a while graphic freeze up... till the problem was solved by HP is BIOS update which turned my fan to the max most of the time....
I am not surprised that HP's CS is rated at the bottom.
Hmm.
As far as hold times... When you're #1 and #2 in the market (and use an OS that supports much wider variety of hardware and software) the support queue is going to be a little longer. Duh.
1)That will be 49.99. What's your credit card number?
2)Please go buy a book or take a class.
3)Sorry you're too stupid to have a computer please
return the unit ASAP. Some please have real tech issues.
Here here. Unless you're a heavy gamer, OS X is an absolute dream to use. Its incredibly easy to use and is, on the whole, harder to break than Windows. Sure a 'pro' user can do whatever they want with Windows and have no problem, but that's true with any OS. OS X's UNIX underpinnings is superb for any pro user wanting to do some more technical work. As an example, the number of astrophysicists that use OS X vastly outnumbers those using Windows.
First off, I have never had a real bad tech support problem(Well, logitech was a pain since they did not have my address in there system, but yeah).
Lets see, Call HP.
Me: Hey, my battery does not hold a charge anymore.
HP: Ok, try this, this and this.
Me: Ok, still no good.
HP: Ok can i have your address, We will send you a new battery and you just put the old one in the box and send it back to us.
~~2 days later~~
New higher capacity batter. YAY
Next time, For some reason they shipped a computer with the partitions backwards. So little system partition and big recovery one.
Call,
ME: The partitions are messed up windows is the size on a recovery and the recovery is the rest of the drive.
HP: Ok, Is it a raid system?
Me: Nope
HP: Ok address please so we can send you a CD with will fix it for you.
~~3 days later~~
New recovery CD's so if they ever change the drive, its easy to get it back to HP a HP factory state. In the meantime, I just used partition magic to fix it. This was more to make sure they new this may be a problem for others.
Not sure I would call that a bad tech support.
Since HP,Dell,ect have many more support reps, there may be more variation is support. That said, so far they have been just fine for me and others.
My friends who have Dells had good stories, One of Dell coming right to the house for a dead board and other similar situations. Once again, depends on who you get.