[citation][nom]Raidur[/nom]I don't trust consumer ratings, considering the average consumer doesn't know the difference between memory and hard drive space. "That website loaded up mighty fast, this computer is awesome!! +100 rating!!" Or the classic saying from my dad "This god dmn piece of sht computer! (mind you, it is a $2000 laptop and never even a year old, its pretty nice) We need to return this crap and get a new 'different' one!! (+0 rating)" I look on his screen and he is typing web addresses into google search and wondering why it keeps going 'back' to google. *sigh[/citation]
Consumer Reports is not a bunch of random users giving feedback, at least not for these ratings. These scores are garnered via a bunch of tests in labs. I know because I interviewed for a position there once, and I saw a couple dozen computers running the tests during my tour of the facilities. Funnily enough, the room where they test all the laptops looks like a Best Buy, since there are a couple of shelves with an aisle in between, and the shelves are full of shiny new laptops. All the laptops still have their stickers on them and everything.
How they decide which models to purchase and test, I don't know, but they are limited by the fact that they have to buy all of the merchandise that they test. They deliberately do not want to recieve any free items from companies, which could lead to any sort of bias towards or against someone. The company prides itself on being as unbiased as posisble with respect to any of the manufacturers of the products they test.
As ct1615 said, they are not going to rate top-of-the-line computers since the majority of the people who read their magazine are not in the market for something that powerful. Their profit comes directly from sales of their various magazines and website membership, and so they market themselves to as mainstream an audience as possible.