Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Consumer Reports Gives Its Recommendation Back To Microsoft's Surface Laptops (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the back-and-forth dept.

After pulling its recommendation in August, Consumer Reports announced that it is once again recommending Microsoft's Surface laptops. "Microsoft's reliability is now on-par with most other laptop brands," says Martin Lachter, a senior research associate at Consumer Reports. The Verge reports: Consumer Reports originally revoked its recommendations after a survey of 90,000 laptop and tablet owners found that 25 percent of Surface users reported having problems by the end of their second year owning the device. Its latest survey concluded that that's no longer the case (although the recommendation site didn't disclose the exact numbers for this year's polling). The newly re-gained recommendation applies to most of Microsoft's Surface lineup, including the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Book 2. Notably missing is the recently released 10-inch Surface Go, although that isn't getting the recommendation badge due to poor performance in Consumer Reports' lab testing, not reliability concerns.

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. I'm probably not going to buy another one by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Informative

    I bought a surface book when they first came out, but probably won't get another one. Eventually it experienced some problems and Microsoft's support was bad. It was a pretty neat piece of hardware, but not a good value all things considered.

    1. Re:I'm probably not going to buy another one by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Eventually it experienced some problems and Microsoft's support was bad.

      That's interesting. We have two SurfacePros in the house and both of them experienced problems. The only reason I would consider another one is that Microsoft support was quite good to us. Both issues were turned around within 3 days with no cost to us. They simply emailed us a UPS sticker and that was that. 3 days later new devices arrived.

      That said, I did find it infuriating talking to their first line idiot support group. It took a whole 5 minutes for them to get through their bullshit: "Oh I'm sorry to hear that you're having problems. This is really not the experience I wanted you to have with our product. Let me see if ..." I actually cut him off and asked him if he wants good feedback then he should cut the bullshit all I want is an RMA number, not a marketing speech. But to the guys credit he became a normal person as I asked.

  2. Here are thefu full financials. Remove a director by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    You may be thinking of commercial publications that choose names to try to sound like Consumer Reports, such as "Consumers Digest". Consumer Reports is very strict about not accepting any money from any company whose products they review and not having even the appearance of a conflic of interest. In fact, even creating the appearance of such a conflict of interest is grounds to remove a director from their board of directors, and to terminate any employee, as laid out in their bylaws and Conflict of Interest policy.

    Here are their full audited financial statements so you can see exactly where they get their money from.
    https://www.consumerreports.or...