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Microsoft Blamed Intel For Its Own Bad Surface Drivers (thurrott.com)
Paul Thurrott reveals a new internal Microsoft memo from corporate vice president Panos Panay which acknowledges "some quality issues" with their launch of Surface Book and Surface Pro 4. But an anonymous reader quotes a darker story from Thurrott.com:
Multiple senior Microsoft officials told me at the time that the issues were all Intel's fault, and that the microprocessor giant had delivered its buggiest-ever product in the "Skylake" generation chipsets. Microsoft, first out of the gate with Skylake chips, thus got caught up by this unreliability, leading to a falling out with Intel... Since then, however, another trusted source at Microsoft has provided me with a different take on this story. Microsoft, I'm told, fabricated the story about Intel being at fault.
The real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team cooked up. The Skylake fiasco came to a head internally when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and asked the firm, then the world's biggest maker of PCs, how it was dealing with the Skylake reliability issues. Lenovo was confused. No one was having any issues, he was told. I assume this led to some interesting conversations between the members of the Microsoft senior leadership team. But the net result was that Microsoft had to push out some existing designs quickly to get ahead of the reliability issues.
The Surface Book ultimately had a 17% return rate after its late-2015 launch, while the Surface Pro 4's return rate was 16%. So though Microsoft later pushed to improve subsequent releases, Panay's memo claims that "These improvements were unfortunately not reflected in the results of this [Consumer Reports] survey." The memo also reiterates high customer-satisfaction metrics, which Thurrott says "supports the contention that I made two days ago... Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process."
"He also suggests that what Consumer Reports calls a 'failure' is perhaps overly-broad and that some incidents -- like a frozen screen or unresponsive touch -- are not 'failures' but are rather just minor incidents that are easily rectified by the user."
The real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team cooked up. The Skylake fiasco came to a head internally when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and asked the firm, then the world's biggest maker of PCs, how it was dealing with the Skylake reliability issues. Lenovo was confused. No one was having any issues, he was told. I assume this led to some interesting conversations between the members of the Microsoft senior leadership team. But the net result was that Microsoft had to push out some existing designs quickly to get ahead of the reliability issues.
The Surface Book ultimately had a 17% return rate after its late-2015 launch, while the Surface Pro 4's return rate was 16%. So though Microsoft later pushed to improve subsequent releases, Panay's memo claims that "These improvements were unfortunately not reflected in the results of this [Consumer Reports] survey." The memo also reiterates high customer-satisfaction metrics, which Thurrott says "supports the contention that I made two days ago... Customers who spend more on premium products tend to be more satisfied even when they are unreliable because they need to justify their own decision-making process."
"He also suggests that what Consumer Reports calls a 'failure' is perhaps overly-broad and that some incidents -- like a frozen screen or unresponsive touch -- are not 'failures' but are rather just minor incidents that are easily rectified by the user."
Not sure how true that is - my linux laptop is having all sorts of issues with skylake especially in the power department
My Intel Core i7 Skylake Desktop has never had a problem with Fedora and I built it in December 2015. Now running Fedora 26 KDE spin without any problems and the machine is up 24/7 except when I get a new kernel then a reboot takes about a minute (SSD's are great).
It is important selecting "Other OS" in the BIOS and Fedora works perfectly with UEFI although you can turn it off if your OS does not support it.
BTW. I have a base Skylake Core i7 6700 since I didn't want the "k" (overclock) version and at idle my machine runs at 40W and if I do video translation (ie. Handbrake) it can draw about 80W with my core temperatures getting as high as 70 degrees C although most of the time my core temperatures (there are four cores) range between room temperature and 30 degrees C depending on what I am doing.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
I switched to Apple years ago b/c I was tired of putting up with buggy drivers and screwy behavior on Windows machines, after I made the switch pretty much all of the consultants I work with slowly did the same after seeing me "drink the kool-aid". An added benefit was the unibody Pros can take a surprising amount of punishment compared to most plastic bodied Windows laptops. Apple hardware has bugs, OSX has bugs... just like everything else. But I've never run into the problems I had with Windows and still see Windows users run into.
If anything, I think the case for Apple is reverse... because of the cost and perception as a premium brand, people b*tch even louder when something goes wrong. Some of the "-gates" that have been pinned on Apple have been absolute crap.
With that said, I've switched to Linux in the past year b/c 1) Apple's hardware is crippled (a "Pro" laptop that only supports 16GB of RAM) 2) Apple charges to much for what hardware they do have. A 1TB SSD is a $600 upcharge from 256GB. A 1TB 960 Pro is $540 and it smokes even the news MacBook Pro drives. 3) Most of the equipment is no longer user serviceable. If I want to upgrade my RAM or SSD or replace my battery I have to buy a new laptop? F**k that, and I don't see how they can claim to care about the environment with a straight face.
How is it possible for three consecutive comments all to all be wrong in different ways?
The current-day corporation is called HP Inc.
The historical corporation was known as Hewlett-Packard, hyphenated, two 't's, no 'i's.