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Fewer Than 1 in 100,000 New Surface Devices Go Wrong, Microsoft Says (zdnet.com)
A reader shares a ZDNet report: Microsoft has shaken off claims that its Surface range is unreliable and said that fewer than 1 in 100,000 of new Surface devices have gone wrong. The ratings service Consumer Reports raised a question mark over the reliability of the Surface line as a whole earlier this year. At the time, Consumer Reports surveyed 90,000 subscribers and found that 25 percent of Microsoft laptops and tablets will give owners problems by the end of the second year of ownership. Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's general manager for Surface, challenged the finding and said that the Surface devices are getting more reliable with each new generation. "One of the things you're seeing is the reliability of our products over time, with every generation getting better and better and better." Reliability issues among newer devices, such as the Surface Laptop and Studio, had been reported for only a fraction of devices, he said. "We're talking about incidents per device of less than 0.001%."
If I am that 1 I will be 100,000 times louder than the 99,000 others.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"Go Wrong" sounds a lot more like it makes bad lifestyle choices than having manufacturing defects.
Is there an issue with gangs of disenfranchised teenage Surface products I need to be aware of?
I'd like to know what their criteria for consideration is.
Surface devices have had a lot of widespread reported problems like hot bag, wifi, etc.
Can we trade our old broken Surfaces for these new, reliable ones? Because if not I would call this a case of too little, too late.
At a news conference today in Hell, Hell CEO Satan said Microsoft is not doing enough lying and other abuse.
Consumer Reports bases their numbers on surveys of Surface owners. Criteria from MS seems less reliable as feedback from telemetry and customers which is different.
What we hear from our customers, however, and from the telemetry data that our customers want to share with us, is that Surface devices have never been more reliable and with every generation we release they get increasingly so," he added.
Consumer Reports goes out of their way to contact owners and get feedback from them it seems. Yes, some don't respond. MS relies on customers contacting them to complain which isn't always the case. Also telemetry data relies on customers wanting to allow access to the data and that the data shows problems. For example if a device's wifi goes out, how will it report it has a problem with wifi?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It matters not what MS says, for they are a very interested party. I.e. anything they say in this respect must be taken with a very healthy dose of skepticism. What does the independent evidence say?
Hail corporate!
Every single one of our surface systems have issues. Most of the problems orbit around really crappy drivers from microsoft related to power management and switching between tablet/laptop modes. The remaining seem to be caused by crappy patches for windows 10 that need to go through more debugging before release. Surfaces are not reliable, and most of our users are looking to get rid of the ones we have deployed.
The one good area is hardware reliability. The hardware itself seems to be rock solid. It's their legendary programmers that are letting the team down. For the price, it's quite disappointing.
Out of 7 surfaces in my IT company 2 have had major problems involving warranty replacement. More broadly it seems about 1-2% of Surfaces have defects that manifest within the first year which is about par with Dell Latitudes and Apple's laptop lineup (seriously though don't by a Mac today the last good model was the 2012 non-retina Mac Book Pro). Sure that's a bit lower than Lenovo Edges and Dell Inspirons but it is higher than say the Gigabyte Brixes (not exactly apples to apples, I know) we have deployed too. Frankly I'm shocked by how resilient the flimsy things are, they certainly are not a joy to use. Give my something a bit heavier but repairable and durable and I'll take it in a heart beat. A 2011 MacBook Pro upgraded with an SSD running Linux is relatively cheap after you consider it is 6yrs old and the only work done was putting an SSD in it.
As long as you use it that way, no other apps, factory image, perfect network connections, it would work well.
But the one you buy is preloaded up to the brink with nagware, malware, adware and "exciting apps" from the vendors, and all sort of crapware. Their main purpose is to degrade the user experience so bad they would buy the damned App.
Every damned app wants to phone home and look for updates all at the same time all at boot time. Unless MS picks of tablets that were in use for six months to one year, find defects and fixes them, it is not going to go anywhere. MS execs will show fantastic reliability metrics. Users will still see crap.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I used a Surface 4 CoreI7 device for 4 months on a contract that just concluded. It was a total piece of garbage. The WiFi wouldn't connect, the dock was unreliable, and I'd have to reboot it every few hours. I would never buy one, and everyone in the agency I worked for hated them. Give me a Dell XPS any day.
In MSFT Testing:
Does the device turn on? Can I open wordpad? if yes, the device works, if no, device fails. No further testing is done.
Who cares if it has to be rebooted 10 times.
Who cares if it BSODs when you type "q", just don't use that key.
Who cares if the battery dies in 10 mins, thats what AC power is for.
Failure is what MSFT defines it as.
If it compiles, ship it!
If it runs wordpad, it works!
product End of EULA notice served.
remote detonation successful.
reported.
HUP
Officer: have a nice day.
Of course, Microsoft gets to 'define' what 'going wrong' means, not the user.
So, their support lines only get calls about 1 in 100,000 made? Wow! Oh, that's probably not it - they must have users with more problems than that.
So, they only have about 1 in 100,000 units called into warranty service, right? If that's what the number is, then fine. But they could then say that if it's true, so I doubt that it is. And their warranty is 2 years? And if I call in and say I have a "reliability problem" that will get counted and I'll get a new unit, right?
So, they only have about 1 in 100,000 units that stop phoning their identity compromising telemetry, er feedback options you can't control, er quality data (yeah! quality data!) in less than two years? 99,999 units are still broadcasting to them just fine with no indicators of a problem and you know it wasn't sold used because it had undisclosed troubles?
So..... what exactly is Microsoft disputing and what data are they using to dispute it? Because Consumer Reports has been pretty up front about how they obtained their numbers...
is directly proportional to how obfuscated the reporting process is.
If the consumer can't find a way to report a problem - or if it's too difficult to do so - this incetivises them to look for a fix themselves and to never report a problem.
1 in 100000 is a dubious stat.
the penalty for lying & spinning is smaller than the financial rewards.
Table-ized A.I.
MS crap tabs are often used by healthcare peeps in the UK. Needless to say they are hardly popular- constant disconnects from the network are a recuring problem- but MS doesn't count that as 'going wrong'.
Why did MS fail in the phone market? Cos senior MS peeps defined every failure of MS phones as user 'misunderstandings'. Apple ensures the (naive) User gets the best user experience. MS just tells the unfortunate user that they are "WRONG". .NET, Vista, Win8 and Win10 show the MS distortion field is the ruling philosophy at MS now. Want a MS tab? Buy one of those insanely cheap atom devices (50 dollars). At near zero cost the ability to be able to run any SINGLE ordinary windows program on a mobile device is just amazing, even given all the problems. At one thousand dollars plus, one judges a MS tab very differently, and the picture ain't a good one.
Think they mean 1 in 100,000 DOESN'T have a problem.
I can only speak for myself, but neither of my first-gen Surface RT and Pro tablets have ever had any problem.
The only time I've ever had a minor problem with was with *software* - a rather flakey Win10 patch. In other words, the same binary as I was using on my desktop systems (which had the same problem), so this couldn't be attributed to a problem with the device.
I've done my part for the last two decades. You wouldn't believe the number of nice black women I've fucked. The babies are a very nice pale shade of brown, kind of like Michael Jackson who was a much better singer than Elvis, by the way.
You're welcome.
That's an awfully pleasant thing to bring up. OK, back on topic!
My company purchased 73 surface devices roughly a month ago. Out of those, over a dozen have locked up or discharged themselves in a matter of half an hour. The rest are behaving themselves. I do not know how this speaks for their stats as they are either cherry picked, or my company alone got the "1 in 100000" devices (based on their sales numbers), but we did not report these numbers to Microsoft, so I am unsure of how they are coming up with their estimates!
... getting better and better and better. ...
Sure... because if you say it three times, people will be three times as likely to believe you!
Right? ...
Right? ...
Bueller?
thats pretty bullshit. We had 8 or so pro 3s and half had video card problems or wireless problems and had to be straight up exchanged. all in the first year of owning them,
When we purchased 2 pro 4's, they were apparently a "bad batch" and microsoft took them back a week later.
My current pro 3 on my desk right now has a USB overload problem where it is constantly saying that the usb device is drawing more power than the tablet can supply. of course there is nothing plugged into the usb port and the pins are fine. This is like a 2-3 year old tablet that was already RMA'ed once...
So bullshit microsoft. In my opinion, surface tablets are awesome when they work, and irreplaceable in peoples workflows now, but horribly unreliable hardware wise. And that is not even touching the ridiculous firmware update process where drivers and firmware update together, nor the many issues caused by windows 10 itself.
a $2000-$3000 tablet should not have any issues period! They seem to be mostly heat related which is probably down to bad design or fabrication. I would only recommend them if 1) someone else is paying for it (and the "any problem" = $600 repair fees that go with it) or 2) you dont plan on having it more than the warranty period.
They are awesome, invaluable, but reliability is NOT a strong point... And someone every few months, drops one and cracks the screen. Not really microsofts fault, but as i said they charge a flat rate $600 for any out of warranty repair claim. And obviously its like a phone, you cant service it yourself, so you got no choice but to send it to MS or buy a whole new one.
Oh and the "optional" keyboard and cover (that doesnt ship with your $3000 device) costs $170. Absolutely required to do any real work with it, or you know, protect the extremely fragile screen.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
You'd better hope nothing goes wrong. According to iFixit the Surface is glued shut and is very difficult to repair.
I'd expect that number to about about 101,000 of 100,000... it's Microsoft garbage, so it's automatically "gone wrong" in anyone selecting to purchase it.
My guess is data gathered from Win 10
Grammar :) So when you buy one and it's not DOA aka newly dead, your "countdown to extinction" begins. However, MS is not the only vendor who delivers poorly tested / not burned-in devices, Dell XPS laptops at my co had about 15% failure rate but I suspect some of the problems, especially screen scratches, came from Dell techs mishandling them while putting custom windows and app image on :)
The previous article is called "Rise of the Machines Must Be Monitored", so i think it's not just a small news that 1 in 100 000 surface devices go wrong and kill their owners! Keep an eye out fo the machines. You gotta take this seriously.
Translated version for the quick readers:
"Microsoft Spokesperson admitted that there are a small number of devices that have problems, but they get better with every generation. Thus, if you have a problem with your device, you should purchase the next generation of it and be happier than you were before."
Excuse me if I don't take your word for it.
https://news.microsoft.com/2000/06/19/microsoft-windows-millennium-edition-released-to-manufacturing-2/
Given Microsoft's track record in honesty, I will take CR's word over Microsoft's any day.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In reality (not M$'s fantasy world) it is 1 out of every 100,000 M$ devices might actually work! Besides, M$'s numbers cannot be proven. All 5 surface owners have had serious problems!!
This figure seems to be extreme bullshit. Nothing like that exists for consumer electronics, and probably even high reliability stuff (extremely) rarely goes that far.
1% I would have found normal. 0.1% I would have found dubious, but hm, maybe. 0.001% is obviously complete bullshit and remind us that the old MS is still not completely dead.
It took an exceptional mathematician to tell them, "those are the areas that can take damage and still be airworthy. The planes that never came back were hit in places where these planes were not hit".
Consumer report is dredging up the wrecks and then count where they were hit. It is finding systems that wont or cant phone home to report problems.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft is like those engineers.
Microsoft tells us that it sees no problems, so what exactly are they doing again?
to complete the analogy, your brain is like those aircraft filled with bullet holes
They've had some pretty crappy quality control: We've had a couple of Surface 3 Pro's, each with the same stupidly annoying bug new out of the box: Use the Surface keyboard cover touchpad to move the cursor *at all*, and windows immediately locked itself (goes to the lock screen, requiring a ctrl-alt-delete to get back in).
Move the cursor again, and it locks again, rendering it completely unusable
Even after updating everything there was to update, the problem persisted. Same keyboard covers worked OK on other devices. Ended up having to reinstall windows & all drivers to get it to stop doing that.
why am I not surprised that an overpriced "prestige" product, fails to meet even cheap chinese quality standards?
because only 1 in 100,000 devices is returned to Microsoft. Most people just chuck it in the bin and go buy an iPad, to try and avoid the appalling customer support for Surface devices.
https://forums.windowscentral....
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Okay, then YOU buy the first 15 versions of the product!
I prefer a proven product with reliability!
Apparently, the MS model is to just rush crap to market, and use that revenue to fix it in the following versions.
Case in point: Windows!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.