Choosing the right laptop is your firm's most important technology decision this year. Here's why.

Our client, a busy law office, had multiple ongoing cases. Seemingly out of nowhere, their laptops would fail, disrupting their work. We often had to rush the next day to get them a spare, set up all their documents and programs, and get them back to work.

In another instance, a lawyer was delivering an important presentation, and their laptop didn't work as expected, leading to an embarrassing moment.

When you buy technology, especially laptops, for your firm, you decide how much downtime and interruptions your team will experience for the next 3 to 4 years. That's why it's crucial to choose the right brand and model of laptop.

We analyzed our ticket data over a decade and found some interesting discoveries about laptops:

1. Reliability: We worked with about a dozen different laptop brands. Apple and Dell laptops were by far the most reliable over time. Brands other than Apple or Dell have hardware breakages three to four times more often.
2. Cost of Downtime: Each breakage can cost an employee a full day's wage in downtime, plus IT support costs to coordinate the warranty repair.
3. Software Updates: With less reliable brands, software updates break the laptop two to three times more due to poor driver compatibility. Issues like wireless internet not working, battery problems, and system glitches are common, requiring more IT support and raising costs.
4. Maintenance Costs: Some popular but unreliable brands cost $3,000 more to maintain over the laptop's lifetime compared to $500 per laptop or less for a reliable business model.

Initially, we discovered that several popular brands were some of the most unreliable. We received four to five monthly tickets for laptop hardware or software incompatibility issues.

Time Spent Before: 16+ hours of support per month.

We phased out the unreliable brand for about 12 to 18 months and switched the firm to a Dell model. Once all the laptops were Dell, we received, on average, one monthly ticket from the whole firm related to laptop hardware or software update issues.

Time Spent After: 1 hour of support per month.

Over time, Apple and Dell stand out for their consistent performance and dependability. Other brands, particularly those from Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers such as Acer, Lenovo, Asus, and American brand HP, tend to experience up to four times the problems over the life of the laptop.

Here's why Apple and Dell are better:

• High Build Quality: They use metal and high-quality plastics that last.
• Reliable Software Updates: They release reliable and compatible updates on schedule.
• Rapid Customer Support: They have next-day hardware support to get you back up and running.
• High-Performance Options: There is plenty of configurable power for everyone, so you can have a standardized solution from one brand.
• High Reliability: Over the laptop's lifetime, you can expect three to four times fewer hardware and software incidents than other brands.