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%."

Comments

Bullshit

[Luthair]

Surface devices have had a lot of widespread reported problems like hot bag, wifi, etc.

Bullshit. CR is right on

[danlor]

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.

Re:Bullshit. CR is right on

[MrLogic17]

Ditto. Of the 4 I saw deployed first hand, 3 had issues around docking & power management. Waking from suspend was always a gamble. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Docking would sometimes blank out all screens, with unknown causes and inconsistent ways to get it back alive again. Sometimes at random it would run very, very hot and drain the battery quickly - and killing processes didn't help. Had to reboot to settle it down.

Company-wide, Surface devices were so problematic that we've switched back to normal laptops. Too many support calls and returns. Updating the firmware (which seemed to be updated monthly for a while there) was a routine process in the futile hopes of fixing issues.

I call BS on the "1 in 100,000" number. I wouldn't believe a number of "1 in 100", based on our company's experience.

Is staring at a pile of six of them.

[Zorro]

Think they mean 1 in 100,000 DOESN'T have a problem.

not my experience!

[citylivin]

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.