Roger Fingas
While Apple and the iPhone ranked first in a survey of U.S. customer satisfaction with smartphones, the company's chief rival — Samsung — came second by only the slimmest of margins, according to a J.D. Power report published on Thursday.
Apple's average score was 840 out of 1,000, while Samsung managed 839, the report indicated. Apple also achieved the highest figures in performance and features, two of the five categories used to gauge satisfaction. The others were "ease of operation," battery life, and physical design.
J.D. Power's results were based on data from 7,994 people polled between October and December who had their current smartphone for less than a year, and were customers with AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, or U.S. Cellular. The survey also limited its scope to five phone brands, namely Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG.
Apple's satisfaction score rose 6 points versus last year's survey, but the top gainers were actually Motorola with 15, and HTC with 12.
Another unusual highlight was the claim that iPhone owners were slightly more likely to have smarthome accessories than Android users. This included a ratio of 13 to 11 percent for thermostats, 9 to 8 percent for appliances, and 7 to 6 percent for smartspeakers like the Amazon Echo or Google Home.
The timing of the survey likely played an important role in its results. Polling began shortly after the release of the iPhone 7, and in the immediate aftermath of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 being recalled and discontinued. Penetration of either device would have been relatively low, and indeed most Note 7 owners presumably got refunds or a free replacement like the Galaxy S7 Edge.
AppleInsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
26 Comments
One more to add to "FAKE POLLS" ;-)
Clearly having your phone catch fire / banned from flights / recalled / shutdown doesn't impact customer satisfaction.
I don't recall Apple having a spate of exploding phones and massive product recall.
What do the majority of people do on their phones? They talk, text, Tweet, post to Facebook and Instagram, watch YouTube videos, read email, play free games, take some bad photos or videos, listen to music and maybe do some web surfing. All brands do those things well. As long as the phone doesn't break, users are going to be satisfied because whatever one can determine is a disadvantage of one phone compared to the other was already disregarded by the consumer at the time of purchase as not being important to them. The UI's within apps are pretty much the same. And since phones tend not to break during the first year, repair costs or customer service is not going to be an issue. I'd like to see a similar poll of people who have had their phones for over a year. And also have the question asked, "would you buy the same brand again?"
But even then, who cares? The masses tend to buy garbage and I really don't care if some idiot is satisfied with their Samsung phone or not. It's like asking McDonald's customers if they're satisfied. By virtue of the fact that they're eating there, most would probably say that they are. It's meaningless.
The differences between phones, which is really the difference between operating systems, are issues like security - things which are not obvious to most end users.
Amazed that ATT ranks so high given a) my experience with them and b) what most people say on forums.