Amazon Sees Uptick in Consumer Satisfaction With Its Fire Tablets, Kindles

pcmag.com:

The latest release in a long series of customer satisfaction surveys finds that while Apple still leads the personal-computing industry, its competitors aren’t far behind it. And one of them has made a surprising jump in the desktop, laptop and tablet market: Amazon.

For all the time we may spend swearing at our computers, we remain broadly content with them, according to The American Customer Satisfaction Index’s new Household Appliance and Electronics Study released Tuesday(Opens in a new window). The customer-satisfaction score for that entire industry remains at 79 out of 100, well above most other industries surveyed by ACSI. 

(For example, an ACSI survey released in July found social media only earned a score of 71.)

Apple’s score of 82, unchanged from last year, topped the PC list, with Samsung (81, up from 79), and Acer (79 this year and last year) following. Amazon came in fourth, but its score of 79 represented a 7% jump from its 2021 score of 74. (In PCMag's Readers' Choice survey, released in February, MSI topped the list for PC brands, followed by Apple. Apple dominated the tablet category, followed by Samsung and Amazon.)

The ACSI survey results don’t break down what changed in Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle Fire tablets to make people that much happier. But Amazon does stand out in the e-reader and tablet markets for offering some of the lower prices around while making steady improvements.

For example, this year’s just-announced, entry-level Kindle is smaller and lighter than its predecessor while adding a higher-resolution display of the same size. But even after a $10 price increase it still starts at just under $100. 

Tablets as a whole, however, continue to make up a minority of the PC business, with 16%