SquareTrade has recently published the results of a research about laptop reliability. The conclusion is that reliability of today’s laptop is very dependent on the manufacturer. The research results are very similar to my laptop experiences based on my own purchases and repair requests from my clients.

In the research, ASUS comes out to be the most reliable brand with only 15.6% malfunction rate over 3 years. This is why I always prefer to buy ASUS laptops. I have owned 3 ASUS laptops over the last 6 years with my newest purchase of the ASUS UL30A. The last 2 laptops are still working perfectly as of today.

On the other end, HP is the least reliable with the highest malfunction rate of 25.6% over 3 years. That is 1 out of 4 HP laptops would likely to break after 3 years lifetime. It is also consistent with my experiences where most of the laptops I fixed were from HP. And the most common problems I have seen are overheating issues and broken USB ports. I always have a feeling that there are some problems with the internal design of their laptop chassis.

A little surprise from this research is that Apple only ranks forth. Apple’s products always seem to be high quality products to me and I would expect it to rank in the top three. Nonetheless, 17.4% is still way better than HP’s malfunction rate.

If you are planning to get a new laptop during this holiday, you should really look into ASUS as they always provide high quality and sleek designs. You can read about the full report of laptop reliability here.