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

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.

2022 Amazon Kindle
(Credit: Amazon)

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% of respondents saying they used a tablet, 20% a desktop and 64% a laptop. 

Other ACSI reports have seen wide gaps between the companies with the best and worst satisfaction scores. For example, that social-media survey found Facebook had a score of 61, as low as some of America’s more resented internet providers(Opens in a new window)—but this PC survey found little variation. The worst-performing computer vendor, HP, had a score of 78 out of 100. 

This ACSI report also tracked customer satisfaction in household appliances and televisions. In the former category, good for a 79 score overall, LG led with 81, followed by a five-way tie between “all others”—Electrolux, Haier (including GE and Hotpoint brands), Samsung, and Whirlpool. In the latter category, with an overall score of 80, Samsung had the highest score of 83, followed by LG and TCL with 80 each. 

ACSI’s report says this study was “based on interviews with 9,271 customers, chosen at random and contacted via email between July 2021 and June 2022 with the exception of televisions (collected April-July 2022).” The ASCI effort began in 1994(Opens in a new window), when University of Michigan researchers launched the project with the American Society for Quality(Opens in a new window), a Milwaukee-based organization, and CFI Group(Opens in a new window), an Ann Arbor research firm.

For more, check out PCMag’s Readers’ Choice picks for top tech brands.