Apple makes a good quality laptop. The problem comes when it requires service or minor upgrades. It is near impossible to do anything with them. They even glue the battery and hard drive down so you can not change it. They solder the ram to the logic board so you can not increase it. They lock up most of the software so your stuck with what they approve.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ifixit-gives-latest-apple-macbook-pro-laptops-lowest-repairability-score-after-teardown/
Dell once made a good system and fell from grace. They are now struggling to regain their place in the market. Dell goes out of there way to make it difficult for people to download what they need, and treat drivers as if they are state secrets. It has never made since to me how hard some of these companies make it to find out the info you need to fix or update your drivers. This is just one of many customer service problems with this company.
Apple is the better of the two but I would go with HP or ASUS.
ASUS and HP do not modify Windows as bad as the other manufacturers. They have excellent build quality. They might add a lot of bloat but they also makes it easy to get rid of it. Their customer support and technical service is far better then the others and they have excellent online support. I have dealt with many companies when it comes to this kind of support and these two stand out.
HP has a built in diagnostic program in its BIOS/UEFI that can help quickly find problems in the hardware. They also have a built in method for recovering from a bad BIOS/UEFI update. I have chucked many lappies because of problems during the update and the customer didn't want to pay the cost of replace the chip.
Can you trust rescuecom. They are a joke and their statistic are flawed. There are those who claim that HP has fallen from grace and like to use rescuecom to try to prove the point. Rescuecom uses a flawed statistical analysis and anyone who can do basic math can see it. Lets see how they come up with their TRUMPED UP NUMBERS. This is from their web site, "RESCUECOM constructs the Computer Repair Report by collecting information on every problem for which customers called us for help at 1-800-RESCUE-PC, and the total number of times we received calls for each particular issue. We then gather this information, categorizing and ranking each specific problem in order from most to least problematic." The key words in that are CALLS RECEIVED from each customer. Another key part of that is that only 5.7% had hardware problems and 61.5% were M$ problems. The other thing to point put is they ARE NOT an authorized repair center!!! Now does it start to look like someone is using a bad statistical analysis to TRUMP UP THE NUMBERS.
Now lets look at the statistics used by rescuecom. If you do not sell many puters then less are going to come in for repair, making it look like it has fewer repairs. It is very simple math. If you do not sell as many puters then less are going to call for tech support. Again it is very simple math. People will try to fool you with these type numbers by claiming that this company had this many come in for repairs and that proves they are no good. If you sell more then twice as many puters then you will see more of them in the repair shop.
RESCUECOM calculates reliability scores by contrasting a manufacturer’s market share of tech devices to the number of tech support calls that THEY get for those devices. That tends to skew the numbers a bit, don't you think. The system you see getting the highest rating from them are the ones who sells the least in the USA. Again, is just simple basic math.
I know how this game is played because I spent my entire life in the service industry. I have seen this type of manipulation of numbers before. While I have my opinion I do not use TRUMPED UP NUMBERS. I also do not work for any of these major corporation as others do.
If you want to know how honest they are, call them and ask if they are an authorized warranty repair center. When I did, they first claimed they were. So I asked them if they repair my laptop will they bill HP and they said no they would bill me and THEN said they are NOT a authorized repair center.