Apple

Apple came out on top of a recent PC industry customer satisfaction survey.

(Credit: CNET)

Apple easily outdistanced its peers in a PC industry customer-satisfaction survey conducted by Forrester Research that found PC companies are only slightly more well-liked than insurance companies.

An overall satisfaction rating of 80 percent was good enough for Apple to trounce the second-place finisher, Gateway, which scored 66 percent. Forrester surveyed 4,564 U.S. consumers online in October in compiling the results, which were published Friday on the research firm's Web site.

Apple and Gateway were followed by HP, Compaq, and Dell, respectively in the survey results. (Compaq, though part of HP, is generally counted separately in branding surveys because it is marketed very differently than HP-branded computers.) Gateway was the only Windows manufacturer to crack the 65 percent barrier, which is equivalent to an "okay" rating in Forrester's survey. Apple's 80 percent score fell into the "good" category.

The University of Michigan conducts a similar survey each summer and usually comes up with similar results: Apple leading the pack, but amid poor ratings for the overall industry. Only Internet service providers, cable/satellite companies, and health insurance companies scored worse as industries than the PC industry in Forrester's survey; even airlines scored better than PC companies.

The timing of Forrester's release of this data is likely not a coincidence, as Apple this week has responded to Microsoft's latest PC ad campaign with statements emphasizing the Mac experience. Poor customer satisfaction ratings are the downside of Microsoft's marketing message that Windows PCs are the bargain alternative to Macs, in that sometimes, you get what you pay for.

Is the MacBook Air overpriced? Competitive offerings from Dell and Toshiba reveal that the MacBook Air may not be so extortionately expensive.

A MacBook Air rival, Dell's Latitude E4200 starts at 2.2 pounds for about the same price.

(Credit: Dell)

Of course, it all depends on your perspective: $2,499 for a laptop is a lot of money. But put the Air into the context of its product category--ultraportable laptop--and you see that, by comparison, it's not necessarily overpriced.

(Note: Here we're talking about the just-announced update to the MacBook Air.)

Let's start with Dell's recently announced ultraportable laptop (or 'subnotebook," choose your nomenclature). The 12.1-inch Latitude E4200 is priced at $2,495 configured with a 128GB solid state drive, 2GB of memory, an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU9400 processor running at 1.4GHz, the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and a 6-cell battery.

(Note: I am not going to draw a comparison with the Dell Latitude E4300 as it does not fall into the category of an ultrathin--less than 0.8 inch thick--laptop the way the E4200 and Air do.)

How do the Air's features fare by comparison? Pretty well. The $2,499 Air also includes a 128GB solid state drive and 2GB of memory. That's where the apples-to-apples comparison ends (pun not intended). It bests the Dell in two significant areas. Despite being less than 0.8 inch thick like the E4200, it uses a more-powerful 1.86GHz Intel processor and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics. This is a crucial difference for some users who want the portability but need more horsepower.

That said, let me state the obvious: heat will always be an issue when a relatively high-speed processor is squeezed into a very small space. That's why, presumably, Dell, Toshiba (below) and Lenovo (X301 ThinkPad) have all opted for more power-frugal ULV (ultra-low-voltage) Intel processors. The Air does not use a ULV processor.

Form factors: The Air uses a larger 13.3-inch display and is slightly wider than the Dell overall, as this video shows. The bigger screen and wider keyboard can be an advantage or disadvantage. Apple may strike a better balance of weight and keyboard/screen size, but you get more portability (based on specified weight) with the Dell.

Apple does not bundle, as standard, an external media drive with the Air, however. Dell does. That weighs in Dell's favor.

The E4200 also beats the Air on ports. Packing in 1394, VGA, RJ-45, USB, and eSATA/USB Combo ports. And a docking connector. (No docking station for the Air.)

Toshiba's new ultraportable, the Portege R600, is also a close rival (based on a feature comparison only) to both the Air and the E4200. Like the Dell, this comes with a 12-inch screen, the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU9400 processor (lower performance than the Air's).

Like the E4200 and Air, it can be configured with a 128GB solid state drive.

Unlike the E4200 and the Air, it squeezes in an optical drive into a form factor less than 0.8 inch thick--in its favor. And offers 3GB of memory as standard, more than the E4200 and the Air.

The R600 also beats the Air on ports. With VGA, 3 USB ports, and an eSATA/USB combo port, in addition to a docking connector.

And the price: $2,999 for the version of the Portege R600 with a 128GB SSD. That's about $500 more than the Air and E4200, so you pay for the extra functionality in that ultraslim form factor. (Correction: the price spread is $500--not $600 as originally stated.)

(For those readers who may want to compare the Sony Vaio ultraportable to the Air go here to see the Vaio TT series. And here's a CNET review of the ThinkPad X301.)

CORONADO, Calif.--There's more than one kind of "green" in the eyes of the world's corporations.

Mark Turrell of Imaginatik and Prith Banerjee of HP Labs listen to Steve Di Biase of JohnsonDiversey (left to right) discuss sustainability at FIRe 2008.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

More and more companies are starting to realize that they can enjoy the PR benefits of turning "green," by reducing their carbon footprint through energy savings or changes to their products. But every CEO always has another shade of green somewhere in the back of his or her mind. Companies need to reduce their impact on the environment, but that doesn't mean they can afford to implement every single green idea, or that they even know where to start, according to panelists at the Future in Review conference.

The goal should be "sustainability," or the idea that individuals and organizations should be working on ways to make sure any environmentally friendly improvements or changes they make to their businesses should be sustainable over the long term, or they shouldn't be done at all. But developing and implementing sustainable ideas is harder to accomplish in real life than it is to discuss in luxury resort hotels yards from the Pacific Ocean.

That's where "innovation software" companies like Invention Machine and Imaginatik come in. Mark Atkins, president and CEO of Invention Machine, helps manufacturing companies develop clever ways to make their products more environmentally friendly without killing their cost structure. Some of his clients are starting to realize that they'll have to overhaul as much as 70 percent of their products within the next five years to meet sustainability goals, he said.

Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell described a project his company did for Wal-Mart helping it unlock sustainable ideas from its own employees. Wal-Mart is notorious for its laser focus on cost reduction, and has started to realize that it can save money by reducing energy consumption in its stores. But the company was having trouble recognizing simple, achievable ideas suggested by employees.

After adopting tools developed by Imaginatik, Wal-Mart was able to collect thousands of ideas from employees that were getting lost in the old "suggestion box," and wound up implementing $38 million in cost savings from just four days of idea gathering, Turrell said.

Hewlett-Packard is using Imaginatik's software to help make improvements to the company's Labs division, said Prith Banerjee, the new director of HP Labs. Sustainability research is one of the new core components of HP Labs' research, and it shows up in products that help HP and its customers reduce cooling and power in their huge data centers.

This is a classic example of sustainability: reducing the amount of power used in data centers helps conserve energy, but it also reduces the costs to operate those data centers. For all the talk thrown out there by corporations as green thinking has become trendier, everything still comes down to the bottom line, said Steve Di Biase, senior vice president and chief scientific officer for JohnsonDiversey, a cleaning products company.

"If you can't be profitable, sustainability doesn't make sense," Di Biase said.