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�...