CES and iF World Design should stop giving out so many dubious design awards and start recognizing companies for outstanding warranty practices and long-term product quality

Multiple times a year, popular electronics shows like CES, MWC, IFA, Computex, and others exhibit the latest gadgets and prototypes from major manufacturers around the world. Also multiple times a year, these same shows would hand out numerous "design awards" to products that are best-looking, most innovative, or most popular. While we think it's fine to recognize attractive or interesting products, nearly all of these awards are arguably superficial or subjective. Electronics shows should instead focus more on awarding companies with the most long-lasting products, best warranty practices, lowest return rates, and other long-term end-user experiences.

Recognizing companies for their excellent warranty services or reliable product quality will give users higher confidence when purchasing their products. Being recognized for making the sleekest and shiniest products means very little if the company designing them is notorious for its high product failure rates or high consumer dissatisfaction rates.

The most recent example involves the 2021 IF World Design Guide which just made public all of its design winners and nominees. In particular, multiple Asus laptops won in their respective "Gaming Hardware/VR" or "Computer" categories including the Zephyrus Duo 15 SE, ROG Flow, ROG Strix Scar, and the ROG Zephyrus G15. Unfortunately, no mention was made to the longevity of these laptops which are all already available. Our recent user survey even found that Asus scored quite low in regards to consumer satisfaction and overall warranty experience. We certainly aren't implying that the awards from IF World Design Guide are useless, but we do believe that they could be made stronger and more convincing with additional awards related to consumer satisfaction. This could also apply to any other manufacturer including Razer who won the CES 2020 Best Gaming Product award with no mention of product longevity or reliability. After all, nobody wants to buy an award-winning laptop only to have it die 6 months later with infuriatingly slow warranty claims.