Baby Steps Don’t Win the Race (Premium)

Watching Microsoft slowly evolve its Surface lineup is like watching paint dry. And after all these years, I gotta be honest. I’m ready to give up on a product line that is always one or more steps behind the rest of the industry.

That Surface has generated equal parts love and hate over the years isn’t just obvious, it’s the literal embodiment of the brand, which exists solely to compete with what was once Microsoft’s most important partners. It was a weird decision to make back in the 2010s, but the only thing that makes its existence palatable over a decade later is that the brand has utterly failed to make any inroads whatsoever in the PC market.

Unfortunately, Surface also triggered a mass movement to Chrome OS and Chromebooks: Today, every single major PC maker on earth also sells Chromebooks, in part to counter Windows and PCs, and Microsoft’s predatory version of partnership. And with Chromebooks now accounting for one out of 10 of all PCs sold—far more than Surface PCs, by the way—the idiocy of this decision should be clear to all. Microsoft hasn’t taken any appreciable share from its partners. But Google has.

Oddly, and despite their rampant reliability issues, curious design choices, and outright rejection of modern technology, I do like most Surface PCs. And that’s what it’s like to be a Microsoft fan, I guess. It’s more faith-based than fact-based. This is weird for a personal technology product line, until you remember that Apple exists and perfected this condition years ago. Which is, likewise, typical for Surface, really. Apple did most of this first, frankly. Surface is like the PC version of Zune: It has some interesting or quirky advantages, sure. But at its heart, it’s just a rip-off. This should be troubling to people like me who profess to love the brand.

Speaking of rip-offs, Microsoft announced the “new” Surface Laptop 4 today, along with several Teams-related hardware peripherals. But there is nothing new about Surface Laptop 4. It’s the exact same hardware design found on all three previous generations of devices. It still doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3 or USB4. And while the Intel variants at least use current-generation Core processors, the AMD variants, once again, do not. It’s always one or more steps behind.

I find Microsoft’s lack of justification for this to be horrifyingly tone-deaf and even insulting. Microsoft vice president Pete Kyriacou is quoted as saying—and to be fair to this nice man, this was written not by him but by a team of PR people—that Surface PCs, in general, have “pioneered breakthrough experiences that immerse people in their creative flow,” allowed “people to adapt to new ways of working,” and provided “innovative and versatile devices that offer premium design and performance.” But these are all qualities that Surface Laptop has never offered, and does not today offer. It’s a laptop.

“Surface Laptop has stood apart from the crowd with craftsmanship unlike any other,” they write, a nonsense claim given the high-quality offered by premium Dell, HP, and Lenovo laptops, and by Apple’s MacBook lineup. They claim that when Microsoft explores “what customers like most, we hear a unique mix of product capabilities and fine details,” and then delivers a familiar laptop design without modern technologies like TB3/USB4. As for performance, in which Surface Laptop is not a leader, they find that “Surface Laptop’s performance stands out not only because of what it can do, but also because of how it speaks to the senses and inspires people.” In other words, performance isn’t really about performance, it’s some ephemeral quality. Folks, it isn’t.

As for using the same tired design as always, Kyriacou and his team write that Surface has been “hard at work, continuing to innovate while preserving the elements customers love most about this product,” and that’s the first clue that this product is just the same-old, same-old. It “retains the iconic design, details and materials that our customers love,” meaning that the form factor is unchanged, again.

There are, of course, some improvements. One new color. A proper mix of Intel- and AMD-based SKUs across both consumer and business product lines, something it should have done with Surface Laptop 3. And there are Dolby Atmos speakers. This is the very definition of “baby steps.” In football, this is when a team punts after going three and out; we’ll play defense for a while and try to score again next time.

Is Surface Laptop 4 beautiful in its own way? Of course. But so were Surface Laptop, Surface Laptop 2, and Surface Laptop 3. They’re all exactly the same. And … I don’t know. I’m tired of this. Tired of the same designs, year after year. Tired of them bragging about innovation when I can see what’s really happening with my own eyes.

I know, this sounds like sour grapes. Sorry. And I know that Apple pretty much does the same thing: The M1-based Macs, for all their exceptional performance, aren’t just still Macs, they’re still the same Macs from a form factor perspective, boring in their consistency. But when you’re not the market leader, when you are, in fact, a tiny, tiny player with little in the way of brand recognition or a positive reputation, you need to try a little harder. And I don’t see Microsoft doing that with Surface at all.

Look, I use and review dozens of PCs every year, and most of them are quite good. Most Surface PCs, too, are quite good, despite their weird limitations and slow-poke evolutions. But what other PC makers get right, and what Surface ignores, is the steady drumbeat of innovation, new features and functionality, and the truly innovative form factors that the Surface team apparently believes it is delivering. It’s not.

And really, all you need to know is that Microsoft also announced today its first new webcam in several years and its first webcam, I believe, since Windows 10 launched over 6 years ago with a cool security feature called Windows Hello. And what is the one feature that this new Microsoft webcam lacks? Right. Windows Hello compatibility.

Unfortunately, that’s the Microsoft/Surface experience in a nutshell.