[citation][nom]smashley[/nom]My experience with Dell support has been quite good, though the only time I called them was during an off-peak time so the wait wasn't long, and all I needed was a replacement power adaptor for the laptop. Concerning these numbers I think that since Apple statistically has a smaller market share, it's reasonable that the support call wait times would be shorter. It's easy to provide good support if you don't have a lot of customers.[/citation]
Dell has approx 11.5% of the world total PC marketshare in unit sales (and is dropping, it was 12.7 just this past October and 13.3% same quarter in 2008), including all their business and other customers. Apple has approx 8.7% of the world PC market in units shipped (out of the 90 million units in Q4-Jan 2010), and is growing at approx 10% per quarter.
Apple also out-earned dell in recent quarters in both revenue and profit on somewhat smaller unit sales.
Apple's customer base is about 70% of Dell's, 60% of acer, and 45% of HP. 90% of Apple buyers are repeat buyers, compared to less than 60% for Dell. Apple fields several million support calls per quarter. These are not small numbers compared to large, they're statistically close enough to call even for comparison.
The fact that apple sells about 70% what dell Does in units, but can profit 3-4x the same, and concurrently provide industry leading support and customer satisfaction should clearly prove they're doing right what the others are not. Keep in mind, this is PURELY PC NUMBERS, not including iPod, iPhone, software, or media store figures which are reported seperately. Apple's #1 profit business is still Mac Computers, as much as everyone likes to think their store is raking in money (it barely breaks even) and that iPhones/ipods are the real money (they're a fraction of PC profits).