It sure looks like that. Someone somewhere may have fabricated the Intel being at fault for the Surface issues story, juicy new detail of which have just been revealed.
The Surface line is the center of attention the past few days after it was deemed unreliable by a Consumer Reports survey recently.
And we even got a look at an internal memo doing the rounds at Microsoft.
But while it defends the Surface devices, claiming that the data in the Consume Reports story was heavily skewed towards the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, there are few details about what caused these issues in the first place.
Driver issues, that is to say, relating to the Skylake processors on which Microsoft had blamed the high return rate at the time.
The company subsequently fixed many of them, but it never really explained by these two new additions to the Surface family had more problems than previous devices — particularly the sleep issues that many users had experienced, where their devices failed to wake up when put in standby mode.
We may now have an explanation.
It is said that Microsoft fabricated the story about Intel being at fault.
The real problem was actually the custom drivers and settings that the Microsoft hardware team had cooked up. Because really, Intel spends a ton of resources to make sure that its processors and chips are free from errors, particularly major ones like this.
Apparently, the fiasco came to a head internally when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year, and asked the world’s biggest maker of PCs how it was dealing with the Skylake reliability issues.
To which the firm replied, confused, that no one was having any issues.
Of course, it took the teams at Redmond several driver and firmware updates to fix these problems, which explains the drastic decreases in the return rates for both the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book over the span of the past few months.
But all this does sure makes for an interesting read.
And would make for an even better read, if ever compiled in a book, sometimes down the road!
