Microsoft has a good thing going with the Surface, with each new product bringing to the table its own unique mix of style and performance that is well received by most buyers.
Yes, there have been cases where the owners experienced issues with the devices.
Admittedly, the earlier models did have problems — problems that led to Consumer Reports no longer recommending any Surface device. According to their study of a total of 90,000 laptop and tablet owners, 25% of those with Surface hardware experienced issues by the second year of ownership.
With the launch of the Surface Book 2, this concern has once again surface, for the lack of a better word, and the organization still not recommending this new device.
No surprises then, that Redmond is once again challenging Consume Reports, claiming that every generation of Surface has kept getting better. More specifically, according to the company, fewer than 1 in 100,000 of these new devices has gone bad while in the hands of a customer.
A direct shot at Consumer Report, if there ever was one.
Ryan Gavin, the general manager of Surface at Microsoft, talked about the reliability of Surface, questioning the methodology that Consumer Reports was using for the device:
“One of the things you’re seeing is the reliability of our products over time, with every generation getting better and better and better…We’re talking about incidents per device of less than 0.001%…
We thought it was unfortunate the report that Consumer Reports put out, partly used the methodology that is consistent with how you evaluate home appliances and applied it to laptops. That would be like [asking] ‘Has your dishwasher behaved unexpectedly in the past two years?’ and if the answer was ‘Yes’, you’d be deemed unreliable…”
He further mentioned that consumers are really enjoying Surface devices:
“This is not consistent with our ongoing testing and we have a good ongoing conversation with them… 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.”
Surface lineup was one of the reasons why Microsoft closed $24.5 billion in revenue in the last quarter. Goes without saying that the technology giant would be keeping a close eye on its overall reliability.
