PC management services company Soluto has released the results of their “in the field” testing which has revealed an interesting fact, the number one performing Windows laptop is actually a MacBook Pro.
In its first ever report, Soluto (via CNET) looked at long term analysis of a “huge number” of PCs, gleaning data from application crashes, freezes, long boot-ups and other general computing slow-downs in what it called “frustration analytics,” and found Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro to be the best Windows laptop available.
Another Apple machines, the the 15-inch Retina display MacBook Pro, came in at number six, behind PCs from Acer and Dell. The Aspire E1-571 took second, while Dell’s XPS13 grabbed third place.
From Soluto’s report: “The MacBook Pro is the most expensive PC among the top 3, but if you’re looking for top reliability – the data is clear. MacBook Pro is the best Windows PC on the market.”
The report does note that comparing a Windows install on a MacBook Pro to a Acer or Dell install is slightly unfair, as an install on the Mac is “clean,” (no bloatware of the sort usually pre-loaded on a new Windows PC by an OEM,) and in a future analysis they will take this into account. For now their study looks at real-life use, not lab tests.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro did have some downsides, such as the need to purchase and install Windows via Bootcamp or virtualization software such as Parallels. The Mac’s keyboard is also not mapped specifically for Windows, and some users may find drivers to be an issue.
The firm used data from 150,000 laptops in its sample over a three month period. They analyzed “application crashes, application hangs, blue-screens-of-death, boot time and number of background processes” to generate a comparison that the firm says yields a “real user experience.”
