We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our What's New Now mailing list. The surveys are hosted by Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo), which also performs our data collection. Each person who completed the survey and indicated they wanted it was entered into a drawing to win an Amazon.com gift card valued at $100.
Respondents are asked only to rate products and/or services that they actually use. The respondents are asked several questions about their overall satisfaction with the product and its reliability, their likelihood to recommend the brand, as well as experiences with technical support and repairs within the past 12 months.
Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the manufacturers compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, the category averages are based on the average of each manufacturer's rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on reader answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your device?"
Scores are on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is the best. Any scores represented as a percentage, in general, lower is best.
A blank in a table indicates that we do not have enough survey data to give the company a score in that column—we had less than 50 responses to that question for that manufacturer or product, and fewer responses would not allow statistically valid comparisons.
The Readers' Choice and Business Choice Awards are based on a subjective determination by PCMag.com's editors, taking into account all of the ratings for each manufacturer.
Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors).
For more, read PCMag's Best Brands.
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About Our Experts
I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).
I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.
In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.
I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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