Philtastic
Active Member
Over the past 3 years, I've found myself often defending both the SP2 and now the SP4 among the plethora of threads complaining about issues such as automatically waking from sleep, battery drain, bleeding screens, and faulty keyboard ports. No more. This Anniversary Update has been kind of bad: it has seemingly locked CPU clock speeds to their maximum which, after more use, has definitely affected my battery life, and I've had my device wake from hibernate on its own and get stuck on the initial Surface load screen with the circle of dots while draining loads of battery. Of lesser note, the background image of my lock screen always shows a blue background when waking from sleep/hibernate instead of the picture I chose which is kind of annoying.
Overall, these by themselves are not deal breakers. What has really changed my mind about both the SP4 and Microsoft in general is that this has been our experience since the Surface Pro series originally came out. In theory, the devices are excellent but, in practice, they're frustrating experiences with bugs that are not bad enough to write off the products but annoying enough that they really bug me. I have never had a completely care-free experience with either the SP2 or SP4. I've always needed to watch my battery life, make sure certain things (namely cloud services) aren't running all the time since they drain battery, make sure that I put the device to sleep in a certain way to prevent it from automatically waking up and overheating in my bag, and, most notably, I've always had a sense of dread whenever major updates come out since I don't know what will be broken next. That last thing is possibly the worst part of my experience: Microsoft often fix one thing only to break something else or re-introduce problems that were fixed (such as the automatic waking from sleep).
For a product that I paid ~$2000 CDN for, this is a premium product that I use for work. I expect something that actually works well and doesn't have major issues months after discovery. I expect a device that I don't have to continually worry about and wonder whether it'll actually turn on and work properly when I want to go over something with my boss. The fact that I'm not even 100% certain that the device will turn on when I need it to speaks volumes to how terrible the Surface devices actually are (to be fair, it usually turns on except for that 5% of the time when I really need it to OR something is screwed up and I need to restart OR maybe it completely burned through the battery over the 2 hours it was in my bag and won't turn on).
And today, I just learned how delicate the device actual is. I let my aunt use my SP4 on the couch since she wanted to show me some pictures. She put it awkwardly on her lap in a way where the stand wasn't on her lap and the only thing preventing it from sliding off was her hands resting on the keyboard which was now bent back in a way that put it almost parallel with the screen (as in, making a Z-shape with the tablet since it was magnetically sticking to the screen for typing). She only had it in this position for about 3 minutes but, later that evening, I found that the trackpad no longer works well: the cursor skips all over the screen UNLESS I bend the keyboard in a similar way as earlier. So now I need to make a trip to my local Microsoft Store to try to get it replaced under warranty, a process that I am familiar with since my first SP4 had a dead keyboard port.
The SP4 isn't the only victim of Microsoft's awful QA. Skype used to work pretty well. After the last major update, however, I sometimes don't receive messages for days EVEN WITH THE APP OPEN AND SENDING A MESSAGE TO THAT SAME PERSON! I recently received a message one day after the fact AFTER I SENT THEM A MESSAGE AND THEY REPLIED! This is both the desktop app preview and the Android phone app. Microsoft has been doing instant messaging for decades: I don't know how they've screwed up the 'instant' part of that.
Overall, I have lost all confidence in Microsoft to deliver a completely working product and won't be recommending any of their products or services for a very long time. Thankfully, Windows 10 seems to work well on my desktop but I kind of wish there was a compatible competing OS that I could switch to.
Overall, these by themselves are not deal breakers. What has really changed my mind about both the SP4 and Microsoft in general is that this has been our experience since the Surface Pro series originally came out. In theory, the devices are excellent but, in practice, they're frustrating experiences with bugs that are not bad enough to write off the products but annoying enough that they really bug me. I have never had a completely care-free experience with either the SP2 or SP4. I've always needed to watch my battery life, make sure certain things (namely cloud services) aren't running all the time since they drain battery, make sure that I put the device to sleep in a certain way to prevent it from automatically waking up and overheating in my bag, and, most notably, I've always had a sense of dread whenever major updates come out since I don't know what will be broken next. That last thing is possibly the worst part of my experience: Microsoft often fix one thing only to break something else or re-introduce problems that were fixed (such as the automatic waking from sleep).
For a product that I paid ~$2000 CDN for, this is a premium product that I use for work. I expect something that actually works well and doesn't have major issues months after discovery. I expect a device that I don't have to continually worry about and wonder whether it'll actually turn on and work properly when I want to go over something with my boss. The fact that I'm not even 100% certain that the device will turn on when I need it to speaks volumes to how terrible the Surface devices actually are (to be fair, it usually turns on except for that 5% of the time when I really need it to OR something is screwed up and I need to restart OR maybe it completely burned through the battery over the 2 hours it was in my bag and won't turn on).
And today, I just learned how delicate the device actual is. I let my aunt use my SP4 on the couch since she wanted to show me some pictures. She put it awkwardly on her lap in a way where the stand wasn't on her lap and the only thing preventing it from sliding off was her hands resting on the keyboard which was now bent back in a way that put it almost parallel with the screen (as in, making a Z-shape with the tablet since it was magnetically sticking to the screen for typing). She only had it in this position for about 3 minutes but, later that evening, I found that the trackpad no longer works well: the cursor skips all over the screen UNLESS I bend the keyboard in a similar way as earlier. So now I need to make a trip to my local Microsoft Store to try to get it replaced under warranty, a process that I am familiar with since my first SP4 had a dead keyboard port.
The SP4 isn't the only victim of Microsoft's awful QA. Skype used to work pretty well. After the last major update, however, I sometimes don't receive messages for days EVEN WITH THE APP OPEN AND SENDING A MESSAGE TO THAT SAME PERSON! I recently received a message one day after the fact AFTER I SENT THEM A MESSAGE AND THEY REPLIED! This is both the desktop app preview and the Android phone app. Microsoft has been doing instant messaging for decades: I don't know how they've screwed up the 'instant' part of that.
Overall, I have lost all confidence in Microsoft to deliver a completely working product and won't be recommending any of their products or services for a very long time. Thankfully, Windows 10 seems to work well on my desktop but I kind of wish there was a compatible competing OS that I could switch to.
