Where are you Microsoft???

Question

I joined this forum right after I started to have issues with my Surface Book (i7/256/gPU) and since then I come to this forum every single day at least 5 or 7 times per day to see what other people are doing to fix all the reported issues. What I am starting to notice is the change in tone from all users, from a peer-to-peer support and collaboration space to a place where we are all expressing our frustrations and disappointment while we count our days to make a decision if we return or not the Surface Book. But I think that the WORST part of all, (at least for me) is that Microsoft is not stepping up to address any of these issues. 

We know you (Microsoft) read these comments and follow some of these threads closely. The only thing we ask you to do is to acknowledge us, jump in and speak up. Tell us that you are working on it, share ETAs... something. Most of us believed in the product and pre-ordered it the same day it was launched. The least thing you can do is to work with us so we can help you to fix the problems. What is the point of having a forum if you are not going to lead the conversation?

Answer 1

Hi Everyone,

This feedback is certainly well received and improving your experience is our top priority. To this end we will be publishing another Surface update later this week. We will post again in this thread when it is available.

When you go to check for this update in Windows Update you will also notice a Windows 10 November Update being available. This is another update for the Windows 10 OS itself and adds more improvements and new features. For more information on this update, check Windows 10 November update: FAQ.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Answer 2

Thank you for the response, Josh. One of our employees reported his Surface Pro4 froze today and is completely unresponsive. This is our test device, which determines whether we purchase Surfaces for the rest of our Sales Department. They are excited about getting them, but issues must be resolved quickly or the perception will turn sour.

Answer 3

Sadly,  I returned my SP4 today. I had a number of problems, but felt all could be resolved with a software or firmware update. I love the Surface and really wanted to keep it. But, then it froze and after a hard shutdown would not restart. I don't need a computer that takes a vacation whenever it wants. It was on a charger at the time and I left it there and periodically tried to reboot. After a day, it did restart (without any action on my part. as far as  I can tell). Truthfully, my 30-day trial was approaching and I did not want to be stuck with a machine that I feel was prematurely released. Phone support has opportunities for improvement (that's the positive spin and clearly an understatement) but at least the store was willing to take the computer back without hassle (except trying to convince me that I would be back). Maybe I will, but I would suggest that people wait a while until all the problems are resolved. I love the concept; it is brilliant. But what is not brilliant are all the problems. Customers are not guinea pigs. Perhaps it might be a good idea to wait a while before purchasing. To those who say, "well all new computers have problems." Well yes and no. Certainly not to this degree with a 4th generation product. Microsoft would do well to acknowledge this and make a note to vet their products more thoroughly. I am left with a less than satisfactory opinion of Microsoft, but still love the Surface concept. Maybe the SP5, after a suitable delay after release. I won't hold be breath.

Answer 4

Good luck to all.  Microsoft just last week finally fixed the broken WiFi on the Surface Pro 3.  I had two SP2's and almost warrantied this SP3 as well before they fixed it.  The track record is terrible and the reason why I am not buying a Surface Book.  That they can call them business machines by any stretch and get away with it is amazing to me.

Answer 5

The only issue is: "Later this week" it will be too close for comfort on 30 days after the device was shipped. 

I really REALLY like the surface book concept and bought one immediately upon seeing it.

I use the various form factors in different settings, only once again confirming my appreciation of the form factor.

Here are my issues: (coming from iPads and Macs)

Why are there no easy ways to do home and end with keys such as Control Left or Control Right?

This makes it really hard to write software.

The trackpad, though smooth once it starts scrolling, ignores small motion. I disabled the Pinch to Zoom and that fixed the snappiness of the trackpad, but only for large motion. The trackpad still ignores small motion. Try putting two fingers on the trackpad and slowly moving up or down, you can get to the top or bottom without the page moving.

Closing apps in windows 10 is awkward. I'd like an option for tablet mode that auto closes apps for battery life. In IOS when you leave an application it writes the memory state to disk and closes the app. If you have ever done ios development this is handled through an App Closing Event call back so that the developer can do special things if they need to but if they don't implement it, the functionality still works perfectly as expected. The issue is... I'm not interested in managing windows, I want apps to open when I click on them, and close when I click away, and reopen when I click back. The OS should do this, not the developer. Apps should just work. Clicking the little X is obnoxious. When I go to all open windows I want them to be bigger. Swipping down to close the app is jerky and weird.

The first thing I did with Windows 10 was to BUY and load the OS up with windows store apps to support the community. Thus the first thing I noticed is that you put them all in a REALLY poorly designed LIST. I want a way of seeing all applications the way windows 8 did in a full screen display. For heavens sake, OSX copied you then you abandoned it. It was a good design to have the down arrow at the bottom of the Metro to show all available applications. You could consider letting me organize it into pages and folders like IOS...

As a developer I found that most of what I wanted to write out of the box were utilities like keyboard hot key mappers, or trackpad gesture engines... but unfortunately there was no Microsoft way of monetizing that because Windows Universal applications live in their bubble... While I TOTALLY agree that this is good and needed, perhaps you could have an advanced section where you can download VETTED applications from the windows store that are more traditional "services" for developers like me?

As a developer I thought that it was a little weird that now there are 2 ways of doing .Net things... I made a text to speech app, the using the old Speech engine, before discovering that I needed to do it again using the new Windows.Media frameworks... Really? You couldn't sandbox the existing .Net Framework? It had to be re-written, and all of the names had to be changed?

I wanted the clipboard to auto switch the device to tablet mode. I found it odd that it sometimes didn't recognize that the keyboard wasn't attached. The first time I noticed this was when I would detach it before logging in... It seems like there could be a work around that for computer settings with only one user account, or use the last user log in... or check and apply settings just after logging in. I typically would walk over the the laptop while charging and want to pull off the screen to continue walking around. So I modified my behavior and logged in to the laptop before detaching the screen. That fixed 80% of the failures to recognize issues I was having, but it still failed to recognize when I detached the keyboard around 20% of the time that I was using the device and stayed in laptop mode.

One of the most important applications that I wanted a FULL laptop for and not just a tablet was FreeCad. I thought it was odd that the Fonts were all messed up with FreeCad since it always worked so well with Windows 7. In lists on the left side of FreeCad the font was larger than the list item... Again seems like that could be something fixed in the OS. If you increase the font, it should increase the container.

It was really obnoxious that there was no two finger swipe to go back when browsing with the trackpad. Beyond that, I understand that you have to install software like BetterTouchTool on the Mac to get more gesture control for windows. So I was prepared to write that software for Windows 10. However... It seemed like that might be a bit more of an undertaking than I was ready for. Perhaps you should put your trackpad gesture engine into .Net ? That would help people writing apps to take advantage of gestures too.

Screen Brightness was really disappointing. The two dedicated brightness buttons on the keyboard only control backlight... REALLY? This would be fine if I RARELY had to adjust brightness, but the responsiveness of the Screen Brightness to ambient light was poor. Put a Mac, and the surface book in a brightly lit room then turn out the lights, and you will see what I was expecting. I really would have wanted screen brightness on the keyboard, or at least the option to change those two keys to Screen Brightness instead of keyboard backlight control.

I connected bluetooth headphones and listed to some music, which was great. I turned off the headphones and the volume never went back to the laptop. I had to reboot to get the speakers to turn back on. When I went to the volume it kept crashing saying that it couldn't find the device. Since the headphones were downstairs I decided to just reboot.

I really wanted more apps... I was willing to wait it out, and support the platform till they came. What I found however was that the apps that we're there didn't even work very well. It's pretty daunting to think that EVEN the apps that are there need to be rewritten. Examples... The CNN application sometimes fails to rotate. If you open it in landscape, then rotate you have to close it and then reopen it to get it into landscape. The Watch ESPN application live video feed went black every time there was a commercial. It still played audio, but the video was black even when it came back from the commercial. Also this broke windows. I couldn't click anywhere on the screen, I couldn't pull over app switcher, I couldn't open the start menu. The only way to even close the application was to lock it then unlock it. That returned control to windows so that I could close the application. I restarted this several times before giving up and using my iPad... HOWEVER I WANTED to use the surface book because the screen is AWESOME!

Something to consider. When using apps in side by side snap, it would be REALLY cool if when I turned the computer into portrait mode you snapped the two apps top and bottom in landscape mode. Think about it this way... you are watching monday night football, and you want to look something up. You snap the browser to the right hand side, now you have a small video playing with lots of black space on the top and bottom. Now if I could turn the device to portrait , that video would fit perfectly in the top half of the screen, and I could browse in a nice wide window.

I was REALLY disappointed with the XBox One application. I was really looking forward to being able to turn the xbox on and start loading destiny while I got water upstairs before heading down. Unfortunately the first thing I discovered was that you cant simply touch the screen and load the destiny application. Secondly there was no way to send ABXY to the console from the application. I found that I had to get my iPhone and send commands via the Logitech Harmony application... and for some reason this also didn't work... Beyond that it seemed like when I used the XBOX One application from windows for streaming, it screwed up the audio on my XBOX and made it so that I had trouble connecting to my party once I did go down stairs... Really disappointed there.

The trackpad was glitchy when highlighting text. Sometimes I would be highlighting a page of text and it would unselect forcing me to start over at the top. I eventually started just clicking at the top and then shift clicking at the bottom because the trackpad didn't work properly. Also it would be nice if selecting text was easier in tablet mode. Holding down gives the option to select all... but in IOS you can just click Select and it selects just one word. If you double tap in IOS it selects one paragraph. It's really easy to select text in IOS and I would have liked to see more attention given to that in Windows 10.

Finally... One Drive. I really was pretty excited about One Drive. I thought this would be kinda like iCloud in that things would just magically sync without much effort. Till I got to work and realized that some software I had started at home, and INTENTIONALLY put into One Drive had not synced... It seems like the default should be that it works like Dropbox. On that note... Dropbox for some reason had run away CPU load in windows 10. It seemed like every time I logged into windows Dropbox redownloaded all of the files in my Dropbox, and pegged out my CPU... which is pretty frustrating when I'm using a laptop and I hear my fans maxed out while I wonder how much battery life I have left. The point is that it works Perfectly in Windows 7 and OSX... So what changed? Back to One Drive... I would have liked to give Microsoft ALL of my cloud data, and get it away from Google Photos and Google Music... but shortly after getting the laptop... One Drive decreased the free storage. So not only was it not working how I would have expected, but now it was not looking like it would be a long term strategy moving forward. I just want you to know that when I upgrade an iPhone, you can wipe the old phone in around 3 minutes through the settings. Then when you have the new phone you can Download ALL of your configuration such as apps, wallpapers Texts... to the point where by the time you get to the car your new phone feels EXACTLY like your old phone, but with updated hardware. THAT is the cloud experience that I was expecting from One Drive, and sadly, it seemed to deliver less than dropbox.

I know this sounds negative. I really liked the surface book. The fit and finish was better than a mac. The weight deisgn and specifications are perfect. When you fold it over for closed notebook tablet mode, it feels just like a thick pad of paper in your hands because of the awesome hinge. All of my complaints are 100% software. I'm 100% happy to give Microsoft $2000 for this device and buy apps to support the eco system. I'm a believer, but I can't hold onto this device while I wait to see how long that will take.