Microsoft, It’s Time to Bring the Thunder(bolt) (Premium)

I get a lot of questions about Microsoft’s (lack of) support for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. And while I don’t have any answers—about Microsoft’s strategy, the timing of said strategy, or the “why” of this slowness—I do have the solution. And that is for Microsoft to transition its entire Surface product line to USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 as soon as possible.

Microsoft’s inability to deliver on what the rest of the industry long-ago embraced is troubling.

And yes, I’ve been on this quest for a while.

Almost a year ago, I noted that In Product Design, Fear is Not a Virtue (Premium). Since then, the firm has updated its Surface Pro and Surface Book lineups, and only the latter includes a USB-C port. But it’s not based on Thunderbolt 3 technology, so it’s as out-of-date as the ancient Surface Connector that Surface devices still use, inexplicably, for power and expansion.

Several months before that, in late 2016, I also wrote about the industry’s embrace of USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. This technology does it all: It provides power, data video, and expansion capabilities. It can be used to drive two 4K displays at 60 Hz (something no Surface PC do today), or to add an external GPU to an otherwise pedestrian PC, turning it into a true gaming PC. And it does all this from a single plug. In the personal technology space, this is as close to a real miracle as you’ll ever find.

But let’s go back to 2015. Back then, I pointed out that premium PCs like the then-new Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book needed to support the latest technologies, and their lack of USB-C support was a huge mistake.

The arguments for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 are so obvious and so overwhelming, I have a hard time understanding any opinion to the contrary. And yet haters and Microsoft sympathizers will complain that USB-C is a mess, that there are still compatibility issues or even power issues so serious that using the wrong combination of power adapter and charging cable could fry the PC.

Bullshit. Every (other) PC maker on earth has figured this out. Lenovo, for example, touts the “anti-fry” technology in its ThinkPads, which, by the way, also deliver fast-charging capabilities over USB-C while keeping the PCs safe from this red herring.

And the lack of USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 has materially undermined Microsoft’s latest Surface PCs. The 15-inch Surface Book 2, with its gaming-class dGPU, draws so much power while gaming that the PC cannot stay charged while it is plugged in. It is not possible to overstate how pathetic that is, and the culprit is, of course, that underpowered, USB-based Surface Connector. Had Microsoft simply added a real USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port to the device, this never would have happened. And Microsoft would haven’t yet another PR embarrassment to manage.

(Regardless of the seriousness of this Surface Book 2 charging problem, we’ve reached the apex of how much power you can deliver over Surface Connector/USB.)

Getting the Surface lineup from the out-of-date here to the modern there isn’t difficult. It involves two major changes.

First, the firm needs to drop the Surface Connector for USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 in all pending Surface PC refreshes. It can provide a USB-C-to-Surface Connector dongle for backward compatibility to existing chargers and docks, I guess. Not that that matters very much. (The only thing that matters less is whether Microsoft ever delivers its promised USB-C dongle for existing Surface PCs. Spare me.)

And second, it needs to move to the 8th-generation Intel Core i5 and i7 chipsets that deliver four core CPU performance with no battery life penalty at all. You know, like all other PC makers have already done.

It can do both without updating the physical designs of its products in any meaningful way, too. I’m not suggesting that the current designs are perfect, of course. And I’m sure that Microsoft, even if it does take this two-step plan to heart, has some ideas about at least minor improvements to each product. But style and design are not the issues here. This technology transition needs to happen now. It is long overdue.

It is perhaps ironic that Microsoft has repeatedly used some variation of “thunder” to promote Surface. The first and most obvious example is the AC/DC song “Thunderstruck,” which was used as the soundtrack for the first Surface Book unveil video. But it also used the Imagine Dragons song “Thunder” in a Surface Laptop ad last year.

Taken in the context of the last generation of Surface devices (I hope) to not support Thunderbolt 3, that latter song was, perhaps, meant to be a hint. “I was lightning … before the thunder,” it says.

Microsoft, make it so.