TheAppleBlog

If the FTC wants to investigate suspiciously chummy partnerships, they should look at the June installment of Consumer Reports. It reads like a love letter to Apple, and the primary reason for the schoolgirl crush appears to be the oh-so-sexy notebooks coming out of Cupertino. Which notebooks? Just about all of them, actually. Every portable computer category saw a MacBook taking top honors. A clean sweep is a pretty nice way to start off the summer.

In the 13-inch category, Apple took all of the top three spots, with the Unibody aluminum model in first, the MacBook Air in second, and the white plastic MacBook capping the trifecta in third. The 15-inch MacBook Pro won the top spot in the 14- to 16-inch notebook class, and the 17-inch MacBook Pro beat out all comers in the 17- to 18-inch category. As mentioned, they had no competition on the podium in the 13-inch category, while Toshiba, Asus, Dell and Lenovo all offered second- and third-place machines for the other two categories.

Apple wasn’t quite so lucky in desktop categories. The Mac mini and the iMac both took second place in their respective categories, which still isn’t bad. Apple Support won out in all categories, notebook and desktop alike, and I think most who’ve dealt with their customer service department will agree that they generally don’t disappoint.

As to Consumer Reports’ scoring criteria, they rank the machines based on performance, ergonomics, features, display quality and other factors related to computing ability. Personally, I think it’s odd that given their criteria, the desktops didn’t perform as well as their notebook counterparts, but maybe they just felt bad about giving all the awards to one company and wanted to spread the love around a little.