Slashdot Mirror
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%."
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.
You've got to, in order to compensate for the lack of basic math skills.
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?
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.
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
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!
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
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."
I'll call bullshit on this. The only way this could happen is if you had some task which wasn't targeted correctly ( i.e. a bad port of an old-style init) and somehow it crashed your whole system and not just didn't start. Which would have to involve something like, loading a custom kernel module that was dependant on userspace (but didn't check that the userspace portion was started). If you're going to spread bullshit at least make it believable. Otherwise you aren't a troll but just a moron.