We email survey invitations to PCMag community members—specifically, a panel of readers who have subscribed to our survey mailings. Sign up here to be included. We also do special mailings to our other newsletter lists and solicit respondents on PCMag.com.
Editors build the surveys using Alchemer, which also collects our data. Each US-based person who completes a survey can choose to be entered into a drawing to win an Amazon.com gift card valued at $250. For select articles covering products and services outside the US, we employ panels of appropriate respondents pulled together via third parties such as Alchemer.
Respondents are asked to rate products and services they use. We'll ask several questions about a respondent's overall satisfaction with a brand's products or services and them to rate specific features.
The survey aims to understand how manufacturer brands compare with one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another. Thus, category averages are based on the average of each manufacturer's rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on reader answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your device/service?" for that brand.
Scores are on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is best.
A blank in a table indicates we don't have enough survey data to give the company a score in that column. That is, we had fewer responses to that question for that manufacturer than our set threshold, which we try to reach to allow for statistically valid comparisons.
The Readers' Choice and Business Choice award winners are based on a subjective determination by PCMag editors. They consider all of the ratings for each manufacturer, particularly overall satisfaction and likelihood of recommending the brand or product.
For other uses of data collected in our survey, read The Best Tech Brands, The Most Reliable PC, Phone, and Tablet Brands , and The Best PC Vendors for Tech Support.
To be part of future Readers' Choice or Business Choice surveys, please sign up for our dedicated survey mailing list now or click any of the current survey links below.
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About Our Experts
I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).
I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.
In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.
I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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