Skip to main content

Consumers are more satisfied with desktop PCs than laptops, tablets, study says

ASUS M70AD US003S review desktop front angle
Image used with permission by copyright holder
According to data compiled and published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, consumers are more satisfied with their desktop computers than they are with laptops and tablets.

The ACSI says that, when it comes to laptops, consumer satisfaction is rated at 76, which is four percent less than what it was last year. Meanwhile tablets scored an 80, which is a decrease of one percent compared to 2013.

Recommended Videos

Related: Here is everything we know about Windows 9

Between tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs, the latter is the only product type of the three to enjoy a surge in consumer satisfaction between 2013 and 2014. The ACSI’s findings indicate that consumers are three percent more satisfied with desktop PCs this year than they were last year, bringing that rating up to 81. That’s one point higher than tablets, and five points higher than laptops.

Of all the big-name computer manufacturers out there, Apple is number one in the hearts of many, carrying a satisfaction rating of 84 in the personal computing space. Cupertino is trailed by Acer (76), Dell (76), Toshiba (75), and Hewlett-Packard (74).

Interestingly, “All Others,” which is made up of companies that include Samsung, Asus, and Lenovo, is right behind Apple with a rating of 82. That’s up from 76 compared to a year ago.

The reasons behind the desktop’s increase in popularity aren’t exactly known, but ACSI exec Claes Fornell has a couple of theories.

“The increase in customer satisfaction for PCs could mean two different things,” Fornell says. “Either the product is seen as more attractive now and is poised for a comeback, or it has higher customer satisfaction simply because those who were less than happy with it have moved to other devices. If dissatisfied customers leave and satisfied customers stay, average satisfaction may well go up.”

Those satisfaction ratings may rise even higher if Windows 9 ends up winning over people who were turned off by Windows 8. Microsoft is widely expected to give the world its first official look at the OS during an event that’s scheduled to be held on September 30.

Konrad Krawczyk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
Turns out, it’s not that hard to do what OpenAI does for less
OpenAI's new typeface OpenAI Sans

Even as OpenAI continues clinging to its assertion that the only path to AGI lies through massive financial and energy expenditures, independent researchers are leveraging open-source technologies to match the performance of its most powerful models -- and do so at a fraction of the price.

Last Friday, a unified team from Stanford University and the University of Washington announced that they had trained a math and coding-focused large language model that performs as well as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 reasoning models. It cost just $50 in cloud compute credits to build. The team reportedly used an off-the-shelf base model, then distilled Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model into it. The process of distilling AIs involves pulling the relevant information to complete a specific task from a larger AI model and transferring it to a smaller one.

Read more
New MediaTek Chromebook benchmark surfaces with impressive speed
Asus Chromebook CX14

Many SoCs are being prepared for upcoming 2025 devices, and a recent benchmark suggests that a MediaTek chipset could make Chromebooks as fast as they have ever been this year.

Referencing the GeekBench benchmark, ChromeUnboxed discovered the latest scores of the MediaTek MT8196 chip, which has been reported on for some time now. With the chip being housed on the motherboard codenamed ‘Navi,’ the benchmark shows the chip excelling in single-core and multi-core benchmarks, as well as in GPU, NPU, and some other tests run.

Read more
Chrome incognito just got even more private with this change
The Chrome browser on the Nothing Phone 2a.

Google Chrome's Incognito mode and InPrivate just became even more private, as they no longer save copied text and media to the clipboard, according to Windows Latest. The changes apply to Windows 11 and 10 users and were rolled out in 2024. However, neither Microsoft nor Google documented it.

Even though this change is not a recent feature, it's odd that neither tech giant thought it was worth mentioning. Previously, the default setting was that when a user saved text or images to the clipboard history, it was synced with Cloud Clipboard on Windows. Moreover, accessing this synced content was as simple as pressing the Windows and V keys, which poses a security risk, especially when using incognito mode.

Read more