With Microsoft having fired the first salvo in what's sure to be the latest round of the Mac versus PC war, it seems that Apple has had an unlikley ally come to the fore to reinforce them in battle: Glowing statitistics concerning the quality of their tech support. According to a new study from Vocalabs, when things go wrong in the Apple universe, Apple provides the best customer care experience out over some of the world's largest computer hardware manufacturers.

According to the report, Apple's customer satisfaction with tech support was 22% higher than the company's closest rival, Hewlett Packard. When polled by Vocalabs--who had conducted the survey by contacting 2,112 people to ask how they felt about the service they had been given a short time after finishing off a tech support call--66% of the individuals asked respondents that they were "very satisified" with the results they received. The survey's results point to the quality of Apple's customer service agents as a possible culprit for the high number of satisfied callers, as 82% of the people asked said they were happy with the quality of Apple's support staff.

Gadget news portal Electronista speculates that Apple's ability to win frustrated hearts and minds may also be attributed to the fact that their hardware and software offerings may also be to blame for the numbers being stated by the report. After all, when you control the hardware, software and limit the number of variations of both that are made available to consumers, those working the phones in a support center will have a much easier time in trying to isolate the root of an issue, as there are only so many things that could be causing it. When stacked up against the infinite number of issues that can come from the infinite number of hardware and software combinations that PC users must tolerate, one can see why Apple's call center employees might have something of an edge over their contemporaries working for Dell and HP.