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Microsoft Wants You To Care For Your Surface Like a 'Luxury' Handbag (theverge.com)
sqorbit writes: Microsoft has some fancy Alcantara fabric on its Surface keyboard. How well does it hold up to the use and sometimes abuse that portal devices go through? Well, Microsoft wants you to care for it like a "luxury" handbag. Pete Kyriacou, Microsoft's general manager of Surface Engineering, said in a statement provided to The Verge: "Just like anything luxury that you buy, like great handbags or a pair of shoes or even expensive cars, there is a care that's needed for the device. And so from the materials perspective, we will ask customers -- specifically customers who might stain it or drop something on it -- to go ahead and wipe that right away. There's a simple way of doing that with a microfiber with a soap and water solution on it. You don't need any special chemical and you can wipe it off. Then just care [for it in the same way] that would go into anything that luxurious. That's more of a periodical thing, not super frequent, something you might look at doing every six months or something. And so if you think of the livelihood of this laptop, somewhere between four and five years, it's not that often you have to do it in terms of taking care of it." Would you walk around with a device requiring that much care?
The annoying bit isn't the absolute amount of maintenance required, which is fairly low; but the fact that it's required more or less entirely because somebody thought that coating the parts of the laptop that you touch with fabric(among the more efficient materials for removing crud from your hands, which is why we make washclothes and towels out of it) would be cooler than boring old plastic or metal.
Even small inconveniences are galling when they are for stupid, pointless, reasons. When the person in charge of defending those reasons tries to insist that the inconvenience is just part of the product being 'luxurious' that doesn't help at all.
Substitute "luxury handbag" for "Apple product" if you want to understand what Microsoft are really saying. Of course, Microsoft can't come out and say that.