The 3 Worst Laptop Brands to Avoid in 2023 Based on Customer Reviews

Key Points

• Customer reviews provide real-world experiences and authentic feelings about a product, making them trustworthy.
• Customer reviews offer a balanced assessment of a product’s strengths and weaknesses, increasing credibility.
• The worst laptop brands according to customer reviews are Acer, Samsung, and Microsoft.
• Acer laptops have durability issues, performance slowdowns, excessive bloatware, and software glitches.
• Samsung laptops have overheating problems, disappointing battery life, and poor customer support.
• Microsoft laptops have hardware defects, software instability, and high price tags compared to other brands.

Choosing a laptop is never easy. With so many options available, how are you supposed to know which one is best? It doesn’t help that some paid reviewers hide the truth to protect the brand behind the device. As a customer, you deserve to know which brands have consistently fallen short in meeting expectations. One way to find the information you seek? Look at the customer reviews. These reviews from real users will gladly tell you the worst laptop brands to avoid without hesitation. With this, we identified a few names in the laptop industry you might want to steer clear of in 2023.

Why Trust Customer Reviews?

Odds are, you’ve read a customer review or two in your lifetime. Truth is, they wield significant influence over our purchasing decisions, whether we realize it or not. You don’t even have to look hard to encounter them. Star ratings, pull quotes, review excerpts… Brands frequently poster customer reviews all over their product pages online. But can they be trusted? Especially when professional critics get paid to provide the same thing? As a matter of fact, yes. You can trust customer reviews. Here are three reasons to prove it.

Real World Experience

User reviews tend to stem from real-world experiences, not assignments. Customer reviews see real people sharing their honest thoughts and feelings about a product they’ve actually used. Compare this to paid reviews, which don’t always have the same kind of motivation backing them. Since user reviews are voluntarily written and come from a place of real-life use, they allow you to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a product’s pros and cons outside of a marketing context.

Authentic Feelings

Asking someone how they feel about a product is a very valid question to ask. Albeit, it’s sure to come with a plethora of different responses depending on who you ask. Simply put, people care deeply about their consumer products and services. Genuine user reviews often carry emotional nuances that tap into these big feelings. Such feelings can’t be easily replicated from the office of a professional product reviewer. Only a real user can express such excitement, disappointment, or satisfaction with a product.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

Another reason to trust customer reviews is the way they balance the positives with the negatives. Real users tend to offer a more balanced assessment of a product than a paid critic, unafraid to talk about both its strengths and weaknesses. Certain paid reviews — especially ones involving free products — might overly emphasize certain positive aspects while downplaying (or downright omitting) the drawbacks. Customer reviews showcase a willingness to be transparent and honest about the product, resulting in a greater sense of credibility.

The Worst Laptop Brands According to Customers

By examining customer reviews, we’ve uncovered the three worst laptop brands according to real users: Acer, Samsung, and Microsoft. While these brands undoubtedly have their strengths, it’s important to know the most pressing issues that customers have encountered in 2023. In the following sections, we’ll outline the most common grievances users have run into with these laptops. In the end, you’ll be able to make a smarter decision for your next laptop purchase.

Acer

Some users have reported a slew of durability issues with Acer laptops. Typically, they cite problems such as broken hinges, malfunctioning keyboards, and overall build quality concerns. This has led to frustrations over the longevity of the devices and potential repair costs.

Several reviews also mention performance slowdowns with Acer laptops. This is especially true for those who have stuck with their Acer laptop for some time. Users have expressed disappointment with sluggish response times in these older models, particularly when multitasking or running resource-intensive applications.

Customers criticize Acer laptops for coming pre-loaded with excessive bloatware, as well. This can negatively impact performance and user experience alike. This goes hand in hand with another issue users have encountered: software glitches and compatibility issues that hinder the smooth operation they expect from Acer laptops.

Samsung

Online, customers have a recurring problem with overheating while using Samsung laptops. Users have voiced concerns about the devices becoming uncomfortably, almost unbearably, hot during even the most basic use. This is not only uncomfortable but also risks affecting the laptop’s performance.

Several Samsung laptop reviews mention disappointing battery life. Users claim that Samsung laptops drain their batteries far too quickly, requiring frequent charging even with moderate usage. Customer reviews argue, “What’s the point of a laptop that can’t leave the charger?”

It’s not just the Samsung laptop themselves that users complain about. Many of Samsung’s negative customer reviews highlight the company’s poor customer support, as well. Users have reported challenges in getting timely responses from the company’s customer service, let alone working solutions to their technical issues.

Microsoft

Lastly, there’s all the negative feedback about Microsoft laptops to consider. Customer reviews often center on Microsoft’s many hardware defects. Users have reported issues such as screen flickering, keyboard problems, and hardware failures — all leading to frustration over the need for frequent repairs or replacements.

Beyond this, some users have expressed anger with software instability on Microsoft laptops. This includes system crashes, driver problems, and compatibility issues, all of which can disrupt workflow and hurt the overall user experience of a Microsoft laptop. After all, isn’t this supposed to be one of the most reliable software companies in the business?

Microsoft laptops have also garnered criticism for their relatively high price tags compared to similar laptops from other brands. Users have questioned whether the premium cost is justified by the overall performance and features offered by these devices. Microsoft might be one of the most recognizable brand names in the world, but customers say its laptops need to step it up.

What to Keep In Mind About Customer Reviews

When reading customer reviews, remember that personal bias always plays a role. Some reviews might be overly positive or negative due to personal experiences, so you should take them with a pinch of salt. There’s bound to be a touch of exaggeration in customer reviews, regardless of whether they’re all five-star or one-star.

Also, remember that people are more likely to write reviews when they’re extremely happy or disappointed. Middling experiences might not be as well-represented. This means the overall picture might be skewed towards extremes, and you might not see the full spectrum of opinions. (Who knows? It’s possible the real truth may be hiding in the three-star reviews.)

Ultimately, it’s smart to look for patterns across multiple reviews to get a better idea of what to expect from a product or service. This is true of the best and the worst laptop brands being reviewed by customers online. No one review can give you the proper scope or healthy range of opinions that multiple reviews can provide.

The image featured at the top of this post is ©Production Perig/Shutterstock.com.