You may have heard that Consumer Reports pulled their recommendation for Surface products, after finding our that 25% of the devices from the series tend to malfunction over 2 years. Microsoft was fast to respond to the findings and now we have their take on the situation.
MS claims that the data was focused on the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. You may have heard that the Pro 4 was plagued by some driver issues related to the Skylake CPU, so Microsoft blamed that for the return rates. The Surface Book also had some drawbacks, like the electronic connection holding the display and dock together. Panos Panay, Corporate VP of Microsoft claimed that the term “failure” used by Consumer Reports was to broad for the issues found and attributed improperly to any issue with the devices, including minor ones.
The same official wanted to highlight the company’s focus on quality control. His response mentioned things like “rigourous reliability testing”, “regular metrics review” and more. Panay did point out that the company had a high Incidence Per Unit with the Surface Pro 4/Surface Book, at 17% and 16% respectively. However, other devices in the range stay as low as 1% and that happens over 12 consecutive months.
If you ask me, Consumer Reports should actually clarify which Surface models they’re referring too, since it’s unfair to attack other products in the range for the problems of only one. It’s like saying all iPhones are bad because one had Bendgate and another Antennagate.
