Turn off the Olympics, folks, because this is the real deal: the latest rankings from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (PDF link) are out and its good news for our favorite Cupertino-based company. Despite a slew of rocky product launches, Apple is still getting the job done where it counts.
The ACSI—not to be confused with the All Catfish Species Inventory—routinely assesses customer satisfaction in various industries, such as appliances, automobiles, and, of course, computers. Overall, the personal computing industry has been profoundly unsatisfying—the latest rankings show a 1% drop, the second consecutive decline for the market, negating all gains made since 2005.
But one company stands alone among the sliding corporations, netting an 8% rise in customer satisfaction. The company’s jump to an ACSI ranking of 85 out of 100 marks the highest score ever for a computer company, and puts it 10 points above its nearest rival—an unusually enormous gap between first and second place. Most of Apple’s major PC competitors, meanwhile,—HP, Compaq, and Gateway—dropped around 4% each, with Dell gaining a meager 1% bump.
Elsewhere in the rankings, Apple ally Google took a 10% gain in the e-business category (man, I thought the “e” prefix died out in the late ’90s) to hit a score of 86, a nine point margin over its closest competitor, on-again off-again Microsoft crush Yahoo.
