Nothing But Questions (Premium)

I genuinely like Surface PCs, but I can’t recommend them because of reliability issues. And the dulling sameness of each upgrade would make even Apple blush. And so, not for the first time---and not, I suspect, for the last---I find myself wondering what the point of it all is.

I write these words in the wake of yet another tepid Surface launch event, this one virtual and even more heavily scripted and ham-handedly presented than usual. It was full of the usual Panos Panay faux excitement, which I find tough to take but some others find endearing, though I did at least enjoy the Stevie Bathiche hair dryer moment. (If you don’t understand what I mean, please, feel free to watch the event replay.) Stevie is the best.

But I’m not here to write about the presentation, though I’m certainly not above complaining about such things. No, today, I’d like to focus on something more important, and more core of what it is that I write about, and think about, every single day: what is that Microsoft is doing with Windows and, more to the point, how it, ahem, surfaces that software in its in-house hardware. More to the point, why Microsoft even bothers anymore. Ten years on, it’s still kind of a mystery.

As Panos would say---did, in fact say---“are you kidding me?”

No, really. Are you?

Surface began as a very bad idea: Microsoft, consumed with Apple envy in the wake of the iPad and in fear of losing personal computing forever to smartphones and tablets, went down yet another me-too path. And in doing so, it forever scarred its relationship with Microsoft’s biggest partners, PC makers. That the man responsible for this line of products, Mr. Panay, is the sole remaining acolyte of Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft is both troubling and weird. That he now runs Windows itself, the product Sinofsky mortally wounded with Windows 8, would normally scare the bejesus out of these companies. But for one thing: Surface isn’t in any way competitive with its products.

This is a rather amazing fact given the decade that’s gone by and the incredible innovation we’ve seen in the PC industry. In fact, this year alone has been one of the most amazing in my memory from a PC innovation standpoint. There’s the industry-wide shift to 16:10 displays after a “we’ll look back on this and laugh” decade of 16:9 displays that were optimized for video playback and not productivity. And Intel’s overdue shift to the hybrid core architectures popularized by Arm, and something Microsoft has been asking for, for literally over a decade.

So where does Surface land in 2022? Well, not in any obvious place. It just announced three major new upgrades, none of which are major upgrades in any way: the Surface Laptop 5, the Surface Pro 9, and the Surface Studio 2+. Each is identical, from a form factor perspective to its predecessor. Surface Laptop 9 drops the AMD processor choices that were clearly the superior option, and there’s no Microsoft...