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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%."

2 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Bullshit. CR is right on by danlor · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Bullshit. CR is right on by MrLogic17 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.