The Apple Surge
As per the report, Apple surges past the PC competition with an 8% jump posting it's largest ever gain.  On the 0 - 100 scale Apple earns a score of 85, 10 points ahead of second place Dell.  The differential is one of the largest leads between first and second in the industries tracked by ACSI.

Professor Claes Fornell states:

"It's hard not to be impressed with Apple." "This is product extension at its best where the new products, iPod and iPhone, are helping bring new customers to existing computer products.  The fact that Apple is not dependent on the Windows Vista operating system hasn't hurt either."

The top 5 ranking are as follows

1. Apple (85)
   
2. Dell (75)
3. Hewlett-Packard (73)
4. Gateway (72)
5. Compaq (70)

Note that PC vendors each dropped 4% with the only exception being Dell which rose 1%.

Thinking about Switching?
If you're thinking about switching perhaps this point will serve as additional motivation.  Apple Macintosh computers are the most versatile systems on the market and the ACSI rankings demonstrate how customer are satisfied with Apple products.  Macs run the advanced Mac OS X operating system and can run other operating systems including Microsoft Windows and Linux variants.

What is the ACSI Index?
Every year in the second quarter, ACSI published an annual measurement of various sectors and e-business categories including personal computers.  ACSI was developed by the National Quality Research Center (NQRC) at the Stephen M. Ross Business School at the University of Michigan.

Here's the direct link to the report PDF.  You can learn more about ACSI at their web site.