Are You Ready to Buy a Laptop?If you think you're ready to buy a laptop and don't know much about laptop computers or aren't certain about how you will use the laptop and what you want (or need) in it for that use, I would suggest you look at the other pages on this web-site to help you make those choices. From here, I'm going to talk about shopping for and buying the type of notebook computer you've chosen. Customer Satisfaction All the major brands of laptop computers you see when you buy a laptop in the United States are average in customer satisfaction. When you get farther, this won't surprise you. The one consistent thing over recent years has been that Apple tends to be ranked number 1. Don't get all excited and decide that only an Apple will do though. Apple only sells what I call entry level and upper end laptops. These are every body's better machines that do do the things you unconsciously expect a "good" computer to do while the other brands all have full lines of laptops for the more budget conscious of us. You can buy a $600 Dell or Acer. You can't buy a $600 new Apple. What do you expect to get a be more satisfied with, A $1000 laptop or a $600 laptop? A lot of people don't think about how they will be using their laptop and then they are dissatisfied because the laptop they bought won't do what it wasn't designed to do. Another reason Apple does better on customer satisfaction is i-pods, i-phones, i-tunes, and the Apple OS (operating system). The first three dominate their markets. The fourth is optimized to work with the other three. There are so few computers running the Apple OS (relatively speaking) worldwide, people who write viruses go for the bang for their buck and write them almost exclusively for Windows OS's. That is a prime reason Apple computers have been relatively virus free. You will notice that I mentioned Apple, Dell and Acer in the last section but I didn't call them computer makers or manufacturers. That is because they aren't. They are what is called an original equipment manufacturer or OEM. When you buy a laptop you are probably getting it from an OEM. An OEM is typically a company that uses a component made by a second company in its own product, or sells the product of the second company under its own brand. It is a misleading term for a company that resells another company's product under their own name and branding. An OEM rebrands a product to its own name and offering its own warranty, support and licensing of the product. OEMs are not the original manufacturers; they are the customizers. Most of the computers you see in the United States will have one of these brand names on it
An original design manufacturer (ODM) is a company which manufactures a product which ultimately will be branded by another firm for sale. Such companies allow the brand firm to produce (either as a supplement or solely) without having to engage in the organization or running of a factory. An ODM owns and/or designs in-house the products that are branded by the buying firm. This is in contrast to a contract manufacturer (CM) which simply manufacture a product to a design provided to it. This was the older model in the computer industry. Click on the link above to find out who builds and sells what. I couldn't help but notice there weren't many companies on both the "best seller" and the ODM list. When you start looking at who makes the parts that ODMs put into laptop computers it seems to make even less difference what brand you get when you buy a laptop. If you click on the link above you can see why. The Next Step We have established that the different brands of computers you see on sale are made by the same companies out of parts from a limited number of companies. The companies that actually make the laptops do most of the design work also. There are no real hardware differences. Except for proprietary add-ons which are usually software that reduce their interoperability all laptop computers of the same group are the same. If you look, you can see this in the price. You pay for looks and artificial brand differences. If looks are important, buy on that basis. Just be sure the hardware inside is what you need. If you are like me though, you don't spend much time looking at the outside of your computer, and how that looks doesn't matter. Price is the thing when you buy a laptop. return from buy a laptop to laptop -computers-wiz homepage
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