Surface is Back, Baby (Premium)

After years of glacial release cycles and a weird aversion to superior technology, Microsoft has finally taken a major step forward with Surface. Did it do enough to entice new fans to the product line? Or is it already too late?

To frame this debate, we need to look back to October 2015, when Microsoft brought the thunder—but, alas, not the Thunderbolt—in announcing Surface Pro 4 and the first Surface Book. Yes, those products quickly succumbed to a series of endemic hardware problems and reliability issues that I named Surfacegate. But on that sunny, happy day, Microsoft was doing something with Surface that it had never attempted before: it was taking a leadership position in a market that, to date, had barely even acknowledged its existence.

In the wake of that failure, things changed, and not for the better. Microsoft stopped trying to be first, as it had been with the buggy Skylake generation of Intel processors, and it retreated to the tried and true instead. It refused to embrace Thunderbolt in any form, despite the rest of the industry having moved to adopt this standard years earlier. And it disingenuously cited its button-downed corporate customers as the excuse (as if all of its competitors didn’t have even more corporate customers). It even announced a dual-screen Android device at a time when the market leaders were pushing superior folding displays.

Yes, there were further attempts at new form factors, but there was also a stupefying amount of me-tooism, both externally and internally. Surface Pro is the only reasonably successful Surface PC, so Microsoft made a cheaper version (Surface Go) and an ARM version (Surface Pro X.) Laptops are by far the most popular type of portable computer, so Microsoft copied the MacBook Air with the Surface Laptop. And then made a cheaper version called Surface Laptop Go. My God.

But Surface has always failed in the marketplace for the same reason that Windows 8 failed: These products, by and large, were too focused on niche usage scenarios that most users don’t know about or care about. Surface has been too concerned with getting credit for inventing new form factors and too little concerned with whether doing so solves real problems for potential customers.

Well, the market has spoken. And thanks to a global pandemic, Microsoft has scrabbled together some ideas from a failed product called Windows 10X to reimagine its desktop computing platform as Windows 11. Obviously there needed to be a corresponding Surface push too. Would that include new form factors or just more of the same?

Some might argue, mostly the latter.

But I’m here to make a different argument. That what Microsoft announced today does for its hardware lineup what Windows 11 does for its client software: These are products that are both modern and iterative, attractive and functional. Most important, these are products that actually meet real needs. Surface has finally found the balance that it’s lacked for almost literally its entire life. And it finally has a solution for almost everyone. Yes, even gamers, assuming Xbox Game Pass gets there, though that one deserves a bit of an asterisk.

Whatever. The new and improved Surface lineup is both wide and deep. Its biggest overall problem to date, the lack of Thunderbolt compatibility, has been solved, belatedly, yes, but also triumphantly. But in some ways, it is the iterative improvements that matter most, just as they do in Windows 11. Those Surface products that had niggling little problems, little agitators, and showstoppers, have been mostly addressed.

Consider Surface Book. Or, as it’s now called, Surface Laptop Studio. Some might argue, incorrectly, that this is a new form factor. And it is, but only for Microsoft: Acer, HP, and others have offered this very design in various products for several years—for example, the HP Spectre Folio (2018) and HP Elite Folio (2021). But based on my experiences with those products, Microsoft was right to look to more established PC makers for inspiration: one of the problems with Surface Book was that its screen detached, creating a reliability nightmare for users. Now, it will remain attached, solving that problem, and most users will simply continue using it as a slightly more powerful laptop, as they did with Surface Book. Bam. Problem solved.

Surface Pro fans, likewise, will celebrate Surface Pro 8, as they should. But this product has suffered more than any other Surface PC specifically because it’s been so successful: Microsoft has stuck with the exact same form factor and display size since it introduced Surface Pro 3 in 2014, seven long years ago. But when Microsoft introduced Surface Pro X last year, we saw the future, just running on an inept hardware platform. What Pro fans really wanted was an improved Intel-based design. And now they have it. Perfect.

And then there’s Surface Go 3. Here, performance has always been the primary concern, thanks to its inhuman usage of lackluster Pentium processors. That option remains to keep the starting price down, but with the addition of a Core i3 processor option, we finally have a Surface Go that can perform well and, as important, can run Windows 11. Excellent.

And what about Surface Pro X? If ARM is really the future as Microsoft claims, then why is its only Snapdragon-based PC, Surface Pro X, so damned pricey? As we’ve long known, the problem is Qualcomm: Its chipsets are just too expensive. So the solution for now—until we get a truly next-generation Snapdragon chipset next year—is to reduce this device’s reliance on Qualcomm chips. As of today, there’s an $899 version that lacks that firm’s expensive cellular data chipset, a feature most users will never use or need. It’s not perfect, as the chipset at the heart of this thing is still kind of a dog, but it’s a huge improvement.

And we could even include Surface Duo in this conversation, though it of course runs Android, not Windows 11. Duo has all kinds of problems, from performance to camera quality to a lack of updates to the lack of rationale for dual-screen devices. But Microsoft has solved all of them—well, all but that last one–with Surface Duo 2. Yes, the price is still far too expensive, and, yes, I still feel like this device will fail hard. But here, again, we see Microsoft evaluating the feedback and improving things where it can effectively. It’s smart, at least within the context of this device.

I have been excited about Surface many times in the past, but I’ve also been hurt by this product line’s lack of focus and strange strategies at other times. Today, we’re on the upswing again, and that’s great: Surface, I think, has finally found its way, and it’s not hard to imagine where these same types of iterative and useful enhancements can and will be made to future updates to Surface Laptop. And that this thinking can be applied to future new products, like a long-awaited Surface display that many of us still want, and badly.

Whatever happens in the future, I’m ready to ride this feel-good wave of momentum. And I hope Microsoft and Surface do as well. Folks, this is a good day. A great day. Enjoy it.