![]() ![]() In 2017, Consumer Reports raised the issue when it stopped recommending the Surface Laptop and Surface Book, though it did so using earlier reliability results. Microsoft hardware doesn’t have the strongest reputation. We do, though, and we’d like to see Microsoft return to the good old days. There are several reasons that Microsoft could have made this decision: cost, space, or some other metric that shows that consumers don’t care about keyboards. Surfaces used to have the best keyboards in the industry, and now they’re declining to just decent. What difference does a few tenths of a millimeter make? About the same as extra cushioning in a running shoe, or a few tiny crumbs between your sheets. ![]() It faces strong competition, but the Surface Book lineup has some of the best laptop keyboards in the market. ![]() Thankfully, the Surface Book 3 maintained key travel at about 1.55mm. In Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 3, key travel also decreased to 1.3mm from 1.5mm in the prior generation. In 2018, the Microsoft Surface Go introduced a slightly worrying new trend: key travel of just 1mm, as opposed to the 1.5mm on a typical laptop. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Windows Store app pales in comparison to Steam or Epic, and it hasn’t really backed major game competitions like the World Cyber Games since 2006. Here, Microsoft has had a seemingly on-again, off-again commitment: it lacked top-tier gaming titles for years, then went on a buying spree that saw the company buy up major PC-centric studios like Obsidian, Bethesda, Ninja Theory, and Double Fine. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella recently said that Microsoft is “all in on gaming,” though his priorities-the cloud, subscriptions, and empowering creators-prioritize Xbox, and not the central issue of PC gaming. But if that’s true, why do recent Surface Books natively support Xbox One game controllers? Dellĭoesn’t an Xbox/Surface gaming laptop make sense? We’d say so. Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay often talks about “focus” in the context of maximizing productivity with Surface PCs. It’s unclear why Microsoft hasn’t developed an overtly gaming-centric laptop, an argument we’ve made before. It declined to take that shot, however, and now Thunderbolt is now the more commonly adopted standard. Microsoft might have been able to capture the hearts of PC gamers by using the Surface Connector to power an external GPU. Thunderbolt 4 also delivers up to 100W of power, satisfying most Surface products save for the Surface Book lineup. Thunderbolt and its USB-C form factor is a more universally adopted interface than the Surface Connector, and there’s a small but growing ecosystem of third-party hardware, including Thunderbolt displays, that can take advantage of it. Then Thunderbolt rolled in, also offering high-speed I/O, power, and new expensive external docks. Even the pricey Surface Dock and Surface Dock 2 offered capabilities far beyond most USB-C dongles of a few years’ back. Most Surface owners probably didn’t mind paying for a proprietary power port when high-speed I/O came along for the ride. The Surface Connector’s strength was that it delivered not only power but also high-bandwidth data, including video. USB-C ports and Thunderbolt are much more popular in the PC ecosystem than the Surface Connector. ![]()
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