Here are the ratings for 2011, on a scale of 100. (Unfortunately, there are some major players that it doesn’t have specific data for, such as Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba–they’re part of “All Others.”)

Trends are more interesting than any one point in time, so here are the ACSI’s PC scores from 1995 to the present.

The chart shows everyone edging up a skosh compared to 2010, but the ACSI folks say that statistically, it’s a wash: Everybody did about as well as they did last year. That still amounts to an all-time high, which is better than a meaningful decline–and it leaves Apple with a clear lead, and everyone else squeezed together.

I can’t look at these numbers without thinking back to the ten years or so that I helped put together PC World’s Reliability and Service study, another project that involves ranking PC companies based on data collected from real people. The data-collection and analysis techniques are different, as are some of the broad pieces of takeaway. But the historical trend has been very comparable: Back in the 1990s, Dell was a leader and Apple was an also-ran. Along the way, Dell lost its reputation for great customer service and Apple earned one.

In the case of the ACSI, I don’t know a lot about the methodology, so I can’t say what specifically accounts for Apple’s rise. But I’d tend to think it reflects everything–the return of Steve Jobs, the growing popularity of iMacs and MacBooks, the introduction of the Apple Stores and their Genius Bars, and the general halo effect that almost everything Apple does has these days.

Over the past year or so, there seems to be less talk out there about the dreaded Apple Tax–the pointless extra dollars that Mac users supposedly line Apple’s pockets with compared to their friends and neighbors who buy Windows PCs. The “tax” is usually calculated based on a comparison of specs–how much you pay for a machine with a particular CPU, quantity of RAM, hard drive size, and so forth. Sometimes (but not by any means always) a similar-sounding Windows PC costs a lot less than a Mac.

I am, of course, a fan of beefy specs. But I’d love seeing proponents of the Apple Tax theory try to defend it in the wake of studies like this. If Mac owners are meaningfully happier overall than Windows PC ones, mightn’t it be a sign that you can’t compare computers on specs alone–and that the price you pay for a Mac is not unreasonable given the overall experience that you get in return? If Macs and Windows PCs are essentially identical, someone needs to tell Dell, HP, and Acer owners to start enjoying their systems more. And the rest of the industry needs to get to work building MacBook Air -like Windows laptops that cost no more than the Air does.

(Here I must pause to acknowledge the fact that some people will believe that happy Mac owners are brainwashed cult members who have been tricked by a wily Apple into believing themselves to be contented customers. The saps!)

So how can the rest of the industry narrow Apple’s lead, short of building nationwide chains of Acer, Dell, and HP stores?

The NPD Group surveyed iPad owners in August, and separated them by date of purchase. Of the people who bought iPads within the first two months of launch, almost 80 percent said they were very satisfied. High satisfaction was at 65 percent for folks who bought the iPad after the two-month mark.

This is not damning evidence by any stretch; it merely confirms Harry’s earlier conclusion that early adopters love their new gadgets. Our early Windows 7 satisfaction survey revealed similar levels of enthusiasm. NPD’s methods are more scientific, but the conclusion isn’t much different.

NPD notes that the first iPad owners use their tablets for 18 hours per week on average, and climbing for nearly a third of those users, but doesn’t say how the later buyers differ. Early adopters are more likely to use “advanced multimedia features” like YouTube, TV shows and e-books. Interesting stuff, but I wish NPD provided a better explanation of what caused lower satisfaction among later adopters. Are the folks who line up at Apple Stores — and those who saunter in days and weeks later — blinded by enthusiasm for new gadgets, or are they smart buyers who know exactly what they want?

Oddly enough, 51 percent of NPD’s respondents said lack of USB ports was their main reason for dissatisfaction, while roughly two-thirds of our respondents said USB ports were either a minor omission or better left off the device entirely. (They pined most for printing capabilities, which are coming with the next iOS update.) Maybe USB’s benefits — photo transfers, keyboards and wired headsets — aren’t obvious right away. Incidentally, I suspect that a front-facing camera is the kind of feature people want in theory, but rarely use in practice, which might explain why NPD’s respondents didn’t list cameras as major omissions.

On an unrelated note, NPD’s iPad survey debunks the idea that the tablet has already wrecked computer sales, finding that only 13 percent of iPad owners bought the device in lieu of a PC. I’m not surprised.

The sudden change in attitudes towards social media among our oldest surfers likely has a lot to do with its saturation among younger demographics. 86 percent of those between 18-29, and 61 percent of those 30-49 are now participants, and the older demographics are likely the parents and grandparents of those younger users.

With families becoming ever more spread out, using Facebook or Twitter is likely the best and cheapest way to stay in touch. In addition, these older users may be executives and using a professional social network such as LinkedIn as part of their careers as well.

E-mail is still heavily used in the over-50 crowd, differentiating it from younger users who have by and large turned to social networking instead to communicate.

I said that we weren’t attempting to collect data that was projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone 4 owners. Nevertheless, a bunch of irate commenters griped about the survey because…it wasn’t projectable to reflect the experiences and opinions of all iPhone owners. They explained to me why our methodology was meaningless. (As my friend and former colleague Ed Albro noted, you never know how many statistics experts read your publication until you publish a study whose conclusions they dislike.)

Okay. ChangeWave, an outfit that does nothing but consumer research, has conducted an iPhone 4 satisfaction survey of its own. The company doesn’t detail how it found iPhone 4 owners to survey, or the demographic breakdown of respondents. (It does say that it surveyed 213 people–I surveyed 500, and several people who didn’t like our conclusions informed me that anyone who knows anything about surveys knows that was so small a sample as to be meaningless.)

The scope of ChangeWave’s study is radically different from Technologizer’s little survey–it asked a comprehensive set of questions relating to satisfaction (similar to our iPad survey), while we focused in on the antenna dustup. And ChangeWave surveyed only owners, while we also collected data from other interested parties.

Overall, ChangeWave found high levels of satisfaction with the iPhone 4, but the company thinks the antenna controversy had an impact:

• Ninety-three percent of respondents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their iPhones. (Impressive–but down from the 99 percent of iPhone 3GS owners who said the same thing in a 2009 ChangeWave survey.)
• Twenty-four percent said that excessive dropped calls was the thing they disliked most about the iPhone 4…but respondents reported fewer dropped calls than iPhone 3GS owners did in the earlier survey.
• Seventy-three percent of respondents said that they were very or somewhat satisfied with Apple’s response to the antenna issue; 18 percent said they were very or somewhat dissatisfied.

I hope to conduct an iPhone 4 satisfaction study of our own–one which surveys more folks than ChangeWave did. I still won’t attempt to figure out what the teeming masses of iPhone 4 owners think; to me, it’s just as interesting to learn what’s on the mind of atypically serious gadget aficionados like Technologizer readers.

And I think I’ll wait a bit before I field a survey. Antennagate seems to have (mostly) died down, and at this point the most interesting new data would reflect perceptions that owners form based entirely on their own extended hands-on usage.

And just to be completely unscientific: If you’re reading this and own an iPhone 4, just how happy or unhappy are you so far?

The results to nearly every question we asked are a split decision. We heard from lots of happy iPhone 4 owners, and lots of unhappy iPhone 4 owners. People who think Apple’s handling the situation well, and people who found last Friday’s press conference profoundly unsatisfying. If you think this whole affair represents a catastrophe for Apple, you may be surprised by the percentage of respondents who say it’s no big deal. Then again, if you believe it’s a non-issue, you may be surprised by the percentage who are still bothered by it all.

Here’s a telling snapshot of the survey’s conflicted results: About two-thirds of respondents who have iPhone 4s say they’ve noticed the grip of death themselves…and about two-thirds say they have no plans to return their phones. In other words, the majority seems to be saying that the problem is real, but outweighed by everything that’s right about this phone.

Almost five hundred people participated in this survey over the past two days, eighty-two percent of who live in the US. Two-thirds have already bought iPhones–a handful of who have already returned their phones–and ninety percent either watched Apple’s Webcast of its press conference or followed liveblogs and other reports closely.

The standard disclaimers apply: The results you’re about to read represent unnormalized data from a pool of respondents whose opinions don’t necessarily map to those of iPhone owners and iPhone watchers at large. As usual, I still find what you had to say interesting…

Overall response (iPhone 4 owners and non-owners)

Do Apple customers think that Steve Jobs and company are infallible? Not in this case, at least: Only nineteen percent of the respondents who watched or read about last Friday’s press conference told us they had no concerns about the iPhone 4 heading into the conference. The rest were at least somewhat concerned. Steve Jobs’ reality-distortion field was apparently operating at less than full power–just seventeen percent say that the conference was completely satisfying. Another 29 percent say they’re at least somewhat mollified. And a third found the conference completely unsatisfying.

Jobs devoted much of the event to going over the results of tests Apple had performed showing other makers’ smartphones suffering from reduced reception when the phones were gripped.Twenty-nine percent of respondents find these results compelling, and just over half think they were worthy of consideration. Which left slightly under half who aren’t buying it.

About two-thirds of respondents think Apple’s decision to dole out bumpers and cases for free is at least somewhat acceptable; a third say it doesn’t cut it.

At Friday’s press conference, Steve Jobs told a bunch of representatives of the media that the media had exaggerated the seriousness of any iPhone 4 issues. Fifty-five percent of respondents agree with Steve. Thirty-eight percent say the press wasn’t blowing things out of proportion, and the rest aren’t sure.

People who own an iPhone 4

First the good news: 43 percent of respondents say they’ve had no significant problems with their new iPhones. Among those that have had issues, most said that they’d encountered glitches with all three widely-reported problem areas: voice reception, data reception, and the proximity sensor.

I doubt if there’s a sentient iPhone 4 owner who hasn’t conducted his or her own field tests by clutching the phone in the “grip of death” to see if doing so does indeed kill reception. About two-thirds of respondents say they’ve seen trouble first hand; a third report no problems.

Apple’s official stance is that lower left-hand corner aside, the iPhone 4′s wraparound antenna improves reception. A little over a third of respondents seem to agree, and a little over a third are unimpressed. Most of the rest say there’s no noticable difference. (These results don’t differ much if you restrict respondents to only those who were upgrading from an earlier iPhone rather than a non-Apple handset.)

As usual, I’m curious about what you think. So Technologizer is conducting a little survey that’s open to all interested parties–iPhone 4 owners (or people who bought and returned an iPhone 4), prospective iPhone owners, and anyone who paid attention to Apple’s press conference on Friday and formed opinions of it. If you have an iPhone 4, we’ll ask you some questions about it; if you have an opinion about Apple’s response, we’ll ask you to share it.

The survey will take just a few minutes to complete, and we’ll report on the results in a future story.

Take Technologizer’s iPhone 4 survey.

The growth here likely has a lot to do with the recent growth of smartphones — Apple’s iPhone continues to sell very well, and Google’s Android platform has gained a lot of momentum over the past several months.

Among all phone owners, 38 percent use their phone to access the web and 34 percent to check e-mail, both up from 25 percent; and 30 percent instant message, up from 20 percent the previous year. The research firm also asked questions on emerging Internet trends.

Researchers found that 23 percent are checking their social networking accounts and 10 percent have updated their statuses via their phone on services such as Twitter. “The mobile user population is becoming more diverse over time and more people are relying on their cell phones as their primary form of wireless connectivity,” researcher Aaron Smith said.

Mobile web penetration is only set to grow dramatically as our youth — who are by far much more connected than their older counterparts — age. Nearly 90 percent of those 18-29 now have a cell phone, and their use of advanced features far outpaces the nation as a whole.

Among that age group, 65 percent access the web, 52 percent check their e-mail, and 46 percent use instant messaging. Social networking is also popular: nearly half log into their profiles while mobile. This is not to say older age groups are not getting into the act: Smith pointed out Pew found significant increases in mobile web usage among the 30-49 year old demographic as opposed to last year.

We gave those folks a few weeks to explore their new gadgets. And then we fielded a survey earlier this month to gauge the satisfaction level of  some of the first iPad owners. More than six thousand people responded, the largest response to a Technologizer survey to date.

Executive summary in case you don’t feel like reading the rest of this article: They like it. A lot. Ninety-eight percent say they’re satisfied with their iPads overall; ninety-six percent think it’s a good value. In category after category–3G service, most of the individual bundled apps, battery life, speed, the absence of Flash–a majority of respondents are pleased.

In only one major area did unhappy campers dominate: A majority aren’t pleased with Apple’s App Store approval process. More than half also wish Apple had given the tablet printing capabilities, a memory-card slot, and a front-facing camera.

The extremely warm response for the iPad isn’t astonishing. (Come to think of it, it’s reminiscent of the raves we heard about Windows 7 in our survey about that operating system.) Early adopters, pretty much by definition, are people who are extremely excited about a new product; unless it abjectly fails to deliver on its promises, it makes sense that they’d be inclined to be upbeat. (Here’s a story idea for somebody–maybe us–for another time: Conduct a survey of people who bought iPads and then returned them.)

Still, there are plenty of interesting tidbits in our data. And the cumulative experiences of six thousand iPad owners serve as a useful reality check on the device’s pros and cons as reported in reviews.

As usual with our surveys, a disclaimer is in order. We aren’t trying to capture a demographically representative sample of all iPad owners and we didn’t normalize the results. The opinions you’re about to read reflect only the experiences of the folks who took our survey–readers of Technologizer and other sites (such as Daring Fireball) that linked to it. Which is fine by us: We were dying to learn what you thought.

Before we solicited opinions, we started by collecting some basic background information. Sixty-two percent of respondents have the Wi-Fi-only model–not surprising given that it’s cheaper and has been available longer–but owners of the 3G model are well represented, too.

Seventy-one percent live in the U.S., the first country to get the iPad.

A third of respondents are the earliest of early adopters: They bought their iPads on April 3rd, the day the tablets hit the Apple Store. Sixty-one percent have been iPad owners for a month or more, making them old hands–relatively speaking–who have had time to form considered opinions.

Everybody assumes that people who already own and like Apple products have a high propensity to buy iPads. And in the cast of our survey respondents, at least, everybody is right. A whopping 82 percent use the iPad with a Mac; ten percent use both a Mac and a Windows PC; just eight percent use only Windows.

Actually, respondents are nearly as likely to own an iPhone as they are a Mac. Kindles, BlackBerries, Android phones, and other devices trail way behind.

Among respondents who have 3G iPads, most are happy with the wireless service. Fifty-nine percent are totally or very satisfied; fifteen percent are somewhat satisfied. Twenty-two percent are neutral, and only four percent are dissatisfied. The figures below are for all respondents with 3G iPads, in both the U.S. and other countries. But those who live in the states–who are presumably using AT&T–reported results that were largely similar to those in other countries.

Thirty-six percent of 3G iPhone owners who took the survey are somewhat or very satisfied with the value of their data plans; another 27 percent are somewhat satisfied. Twenty-two percent say they have no opinion on the matter; eleven percent are somewhat or very dissatisfied. Three percent say they’re totally dissatisfied. As with the previous question, the responses from U.S. iPad owners and those in other countries didn’t differ much. (We conducted the survey at the very tail end of AT&T’s unlimited data plan offering; it would be interesting to ask again now that new buyers must choose a plan that gives them a fixed amount of data each month.)

In the chart about iPad’s bundled apps and Apple’s iWork ones below, orange represents extreme happiness, blue shows happiness, purple indicates mild-favorability-bordering-on-neutrality, and red means unhappiness. (Only ratings from people who have tried each app are shown.) Enthusiasm runs high for almost everything–especially Safari and Maps. Notes is the only built-in app that inspires noticeably less excitement: Around half of the people who have tried it think it’s fair or poor. And the iWork apps get decent numbers overall, but fewer people think they’re excellent than with most of the standard programs.

When we asked about key iPad features, orange (“Totally Satisfied”) and blue (“Very Satisfied”) again dominated. A whopping 79 percent of respondents are totally satisfied with the device’s battery life; 66 percent are totally satisfied with its speed; 60 percent are totally satisfied with its user interface. Weight and size weren’t received with the same level of bliss, but 75 percent of respondents still said they were totally or very satisfied. And while there have been widespread reports of trouble with iPad Wi-Fi, only eight percent of respondents said they were somewhat, very, or totally dissatisfied with their Wi-Fi experience.

We also asked about features which Apple could have included in the iPad but didn’t–and here the respondents were more critical. In the chart below, lots of purple and red indicates missing features which many people want: Printing was number one on their wish list, followed by a front-facing camera and a built-in slot for memory cards. The iPad’s sealed battery turns out not to be particularly controversial–more than three quarters of respondents are okay with it, and sixty-one percent say the fixed one is better.