I came across this post on Forrester's technology brand report from Ted Schadler (the author) and feel it's worth sharing. Ted's research is showing where weaknesses and gaps exist in major technology brands, and who's having success leveraging their brand with consumers. Some of his notes:

For most technology brands, trust has fallen since 2003. This is a big story for the entire technology sector. The reasons are many, but our analysis shows that more lower-income technology pessimists (you call them "mainstream" consumers -- but that doesn't help marketers much) are using technology brands today. And low-income tech pessimists have much lower brand trust than high-income tech optimists.

It's important for us as site owners, business owners and marketers to remember how weak the general trust in the online space still is among consumers. For most of the readers here, we trust Hotmail's reliability, Flickr's data integrity and Amazon's return policy far more than we trust small retailers in the offline world, but that isn't the case for the majority of consumers.

The profile of aspiring users -- those who want to use the brand but don't today -- reveals critically important things to marketers: Dell must find technology pessimists where they shop (offline); Apple must convince consumers that its products are affordable; and Sony must make the brand interesting to brand-agnostic consumers.

Even I'm not convinced that Apple is affordable and Sony doesn't seem particularly more valuable than Panasonic or Philips or Samsung to me.