In Product Design, Fear is Not a Virtue (Premium)

After leading the charge to Skylake with Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 to disastrous results, Microsoft is now much more timid about adopting leading edge technologies. That's not just unfortunate. It's a mistake.

It should also be a wake-up call for anyone who is excited by Microsoft's Surface Laptop, as I (still) am. This device has some interesting innovations, for sure: That Alcantara fabric on the keyboard deck is unlike anything on any other laptop.

But a luxury material is just that, a luxury. With Surface Laptop, Microsoft is claiming that it has made a device that can last for the four years of a traditional college experience. (It's closer to five and a half years these days, but let's stay focused.) And those four-plus years will be pretty painful for many Surface Laptop owners.

For starters, the firm has allowed a model with just 4 GB of RAM to ruin what should have been a premium experience across the board. No Surface device should ship with less than 8 GB of RAM, in my opinion.

Worse, the most-touted feature of this new product, the four color choices, is not even available on the entry-level Surface Book, nor is it available on the more expensive Core i7-based models. That is inexcusable.

But worse still is Microsoft's outright fear of modern technology. Surface Laptop is artificially constrained by its use of the USB 3-based Surface Connect port, which is used for both power and expansion. And by its minimalist, Apple-like port selection. This device, inexplicably, does not even include a single USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port.

Microsoft, I shouldn't have to tell you this. But it's 2017, and all other PC makers have embraced USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 as a de facto standard for power and expansion. This technology is so much more powerful than USB 3, I don't even know where to start.

So I'll just start with the obvious: Had Surface Laptop included USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, the software giant could have credibly claimed that this device was future proof, and that it was in some way still leading the market. But it doesn't.

More to the point, I think this decision, this lack of leadership, says a lot about Microsoft and the Surface product line here in the first half 2017. And it's not positive. Here's Microsoft, promoting a gorgeous new machine with yesteryear's technology. This is the opposite of leadership. They're not even following, they're drifting off and walking backward.

(Speaking of which, the firm's crazy stance on the nearly-two-year old Surface Pro 4 is also drunkenly off-balance.)

It's too bad, but it's also unnecessary. HP, Lenovo, and others have already figured out how to make this work, how to bridge the past (USB 3, proprietary power and expansion) with the future (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3). They've figured out how to prevent "bad" USB-C cables from hurting their devices. And they've figured out what their customers want, and aren't just doing what's easiest and safest.

There is so much to like ...

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