Consumer Reports, the magazine/agency that Millennials and younger have no idea who they are or what they do, announced today that it’s downgrading Microsoft’s entire Surface line of products from a previous ‘recommended’ designation to now, not so much.
The independent research entity sites a multitude of reported issues, including random freezing, hangups, and unresponsive touchscreen, aggregating that:
“25 percent of Microsoft laptops and tablets will present their owners with problems by the end of the second year of ownership.”
As an owner of a Surface Pro 4, I can only say: tell me something I don’t already know.
I shall say upfront that I absolutely adore the SP4; the display is superb and better than the competition, the duo form-factor of tablet and laptop is a revelation, and the overall design and packaging is engineered excellence on par with the anything made by Apple, the industry benchmark.
The Surface Pro 4 has been on the market for over two years, and to this day there’s still inexplicable hangups and unresponsiveness on mine, the nadir of which is the utterly broken sleep function. Waking the device up from sleep is always a roulette-style game of chance of whether or not upon the first click of the keyboard the screen will return to life. Sadly, it’s miserably hit or miss, and Microsoft have seemingly given up on addressing the issue - after multitudes of firmware and software updates already - now that the fifth-generation Surface Pro device have arrived.
There’s no question the Surface line of products from Microsoft have in short time revolutionized the Windows computing hardware experience. Finally, non-Apple users have access to high-end premium devices that are designed and created as meticulously as Cupertino has done for the past decade. I myself jumped onboard after having previously ran Macbooks since college. The competition from Microsoft have done well to spurn on both companies.
What we are seeing today from Consumer Reports is a validation that Microsoft’s meteoric rise in the computing hardware business naturally includes tremendous teething problems.