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 apar...