Dell's battery recall was more massive in scope and more jarring -- the photo alone of a Dell notebook bursting into flames at a conference in Japan last year was simply more attention-grabbing than Apple's press release that it would recall Sony batteries. Dell's financial issues are also much different than Apple's. In Apple's case, the problems are limited to stock options backdating. Apple has published details of its investigation in a filing with the SEC and says no evidence has surfaced that any current management knowingly did anything wrong.

In Dell's case, executives have simply stopped talking about whatever it is the SEC and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York are investigating. It's not about options backdating, one executive has said, although the company admits some financial results may have been misstated in recent years. In the absence of more detail, Dell is leaving everyone to wonder what's really at issue in Round Rock.

Scoble also suggests that the press has focused more on blogger complaints about Dell than customer complaints about problems with Apple. But Dell executives -- even before the financial investigations came to light -- admitted they had let their customer service problems grow to an unacceptable level. One blog post by Jeff Jarvis complaining about Dell brought hundreds of comments that said, essentially, "Right on."

(By the way, a Technorati search for "Dell customer service" yields 968 blog posts written in English. A search for blog posts with "Apple customer service" yields 355 results. It appears there are many more bloggers who have comments they want to make about Dell than who want to talk about Apple.)

One more difference:

Unlike Dell, Apple has an army of channel partners who are on the front lines and working with customers to keep them happy and keep them returning to the Apple brand. When Dell, with its direct sales model, goes through a bad stretch it's on its own.