Results: Brands You Love & Hate

In our last post we asked what everyones most liked and hated brands are. We got a fantastic response from our readers with some very interesting responses. I have gone through all of the responses and here are the results:

Most Liked Hardware Brands:

Laptops – Lenovo/IBM, ASUS, Toshiba, Dell (mid-high priced stuff)
Motherboards – ASUS, Gigabyte & EVGA
RAM – Kingston, Crucial, Corsair
Hard Drives – Was 50/50 between Western Digital and Seagate. However, people mentioned Western Digital Black was especially good.
Printers – Epson, Samsung, Xerox, Brother (Laser), Canon, HP (high end)
Keyboards – Logitech, Microsoft
Mice – Logitech
Routers – No winner
Optical Drives – Lite-On, ASUS

Most Hated Hardware Brands:

Laptops – HP/Compaq, Sony, Acer/Gateway/eMachines
Motherboards – Intel, ASRock, MSI
RAM – Most generic or “value” brands
Hard Drives – Fujitsu, Maxtor, Hitachi
Printers – HP (low-mid end), Lexmark
Routers – Belkin
Optical Drives – No Loser

Brand Specific Comments

Acer/Gateway/emachines/Packard Bell
Gateway, eMachines and Packard Bell are all owned by Acer so these have been grouped together. These brands were hated across the board because of their low quality hardware.

Apple
Apple was in the middle with the Computer Technicians. Most people said that Apple generally has excellent support but if your hardware fails out of warranty, its probably going to be an expensive endeavor to fix it. Some people did express their displeasure of the overall price of Apple hardware.

ASUS
ASUS was mentioned many times along side Gigabyte as the motherboard brand to get. ASUS laptops also got a fair bit of love from the readers for being very reliable. ASUS support was also mentioned as being very good.

Brother
Brother laser printers got a few mentions both good and bad. However, there were more people saying they liked Brother laser printers than those who said they didnt like them.

Dell
Many technicians didnt like their weird custom built hardware but they did say that they had fairly good support. Some technicians liked the fact that Dell usually provides restore CDs to make a technicians job easier. The readers also mentioned that their high end server and enterprise products were great.

Epson
Good reliable printers, streamlined drivers and cheap running costs.

Gigabyte
Gigabyte was 50/50 with ASUS. These two seem to be just as good as eachother.

Hewlett-Packard/Compaq
HP seemed to be hated by just about all of the Computer Technicians who responded with the exception of their high end server and enterprise products which are apparently very good. The low end HP printers seem to be the main cause of the hate towards HP. The support is dismal, the drivers are bug ridden and bloated (often many hundreds of megabytes in size) and the running costs are high. Most technicians said to avoid HP at all costs.

Lenovo
Lenovo makes good and study laptops. Many technicians said they just dont see them fail much.

Lexmark
Lexmark received a lot of hate, mainly for their printers poor build quality, bad drivers and even worse support.

Linksys
Linksys and Netgear appeared to be both praised and hated by the readers. Some said they have some Linksys routers that have never failed, other said that one of the main routers they see failing are Linksys. The same applies to Netgear.

Lite-On
Some readers really liked Lite-On and others hated it. However, there were more users liking it than hating it.

Logitech
Logitech received a lot of love from the readers. They make good solid hardware, especially their keyboards and mice. Logitech often replace hardware that is well out of its warranty.

Microsoft
Microsoft keyboards got a lot of mentions saying they were good solid hardware. However, their mice didn’t get mentioned much.

Micro-Star International (MSI)
MSI didnt get very many mentions but in the few posts where it was, they were negative.

Netgear
Netgear was 50/50 with Linksys. Some said they are the worst, some said they are the best.

Samsung
Samsung laser printers got a few mentions as being great, low priced but reliable printers. Some readers said they didn’t like Samsung printers and laptops.

Seagate
The battle between Seagate and Western Digital was interesting. Some users said that they hate Western Digital hard drives and will only ever buy Seagate, while others said they love Western Digital and will never touch a Seagate.

Sony
Quite a few people said they despise Sony but didn’t say why. One of the few reasons that was mentioned was the whole Sony Rootkit scandal that happened in 2005.

Toshiba
Toshiba laptops has some good mentions, especially their mid-price and higher models.

Western Digital
Same as Seagate. However, many technicians that said they liked Western Digital hardware specifically mentioned the Western Digital Black product line.

Xerox
Xerox was mentioned a few times by the readers saying that their laser printers are great.

Final Thoughts
These results may be slightly skewed against some of the bigger names. When a Technician says that they see a lot of failed Acer laptops come into the shop, we need to keep in mind that there is a huge amount of Acer laptops out there. One person mentioned this skewing of results by giving the following example:
“It’s like saying 90% of the cancer victims in Seattle, WA, worked at Boeing. Well, 90% of the people in Seattle WORK at Boeing.”
Having said that, some brands such as HP was on just about everyones hate list. So although HP is very common, being on everyones hate list is quite telling about the brand.

Thank you to all those who participated, we got a great response with very interesting results.