Microsoft Surface Book — Not Ready for Prime Time

Great timing. My Dell XPS 15 has been a relatively fantastic workhorse for the past 4 years. However, the motherboard is on the fritz, it’s going to cost about $400 just for a new motherboard, and then I’d either have to install it myself or pay someone to do it. Too much hassle.

When the sudden-shutdown craziness began with my Dell several months ago, I was ready to get a new one. But I decided to wait (and wait, and wait) for the new Intel 6th generation processors (Skylake) to appear.

Then last week I saw the Microsoft presentation of its first laptop called the Surface Book. Microsoft has never been the greatest at naming stuff, and the only two names they really nailed were its XP operating system and the Xbox gaming console.

This new entry into the crowded laptop market looked amazing. It sounded amazing. And honestly, aren’t we all just getting a bit sick of watching Apple crush the competition? Seriously, you know that things are bad when an Apple laptop running Bootcamp can navigate through Windows faster than a native Windows laptop.

So, like many others, I was really excited. The timing was great because I’m looking for a new laptop. I’m the sort of person that Microsoft is targeting (i.e. a person who can rationalize dropping $2000 for a laptop). I appreciate design details, I’m relatively savvy about computers, and so much of my life centers around a well-functioning laptop.

The next part of this story has certain elements about Microsoft’s peripheral service (e.g. its website, customer service, etc.) mixed in because it shows how all the excitement about the Surface Book is just hype. The bottom line is that Microsoft just wasn’t ready to launch this product.

The first thing I did when the announcement of the Surface Book happened was to go to the official Microsoft website (www.microsoft.com) to take a look at it. After years of watching Apple do this for its products (and do it extremely well), I figured that Microsoft would be able to do a decent job.

The layout isn’t so bad, but the devils are in the details.

Still, as of today (October 11, 2015), when you go to the Surface Book section, you’ll see the Surface Book sitting on the left side of the screen and the name of the product and its price and pre-order button to the right.

This is where things start to fall apart.

Directly under the image of the Surface Book is a command that says, “drag for 360 degrees”, and there is an arrow on either side indicating the direction you have to drag. But if you click on this command with the cursor and drag it, the letters for the command move but nothing happens to the picture of the Surface Book.

It took me a little while to figure out that you have to click on the actual picture of the Surface Book (and not on the command itself) and then hold down on the mouse as you drag to the left and right to rotate the image.

As for the straight arrows on either side of the drag command? Wow, that looks just like the exact same arrows that I’ve been using for my rudimentary PowerPoint presentations since high school. C’mon Microsoft, you couldn’t even used curved arrows?

Microsoft, would it have killed you to put a zoom-in function on this page? Seriously, Amazon can do this for every product it has a picture for, but you can’t?

Then below the drag command are two icons. The one on the left is completely ridiculous because it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s the etch-a-sketch drawing of two mountains. Again, it’s the kind of thing I doodle in PowerPoint because I have no artistic skill. I clicked on it just for the hell of it and up came a slide show.

Seriously, whoever came up with that idea should be fired. The last thing any consumer wants to do is have to guess what the heck to do on a product website and then have to sit through a slide show. To make matters worse, the slide show is juvenile. The Surface Book is silver and not only are almost all of the pictures overexposed but they opted to use a white background. I guess Microsoft is trying to exude elegance, but it just makes it seem like the company put that slide show together at the last minute.

Also, there’s no writing or captions for each picture. So, you just have to kind of guess about what Microsoft wants you to focus on. Heavy sigh…

There’s also a movie button, and fortunately the company did a good job with its YouTube video.

Also, after my numerous dealings with Dell’s tech support line, I’m a firm believer that you can take your chances with not getting additional insurance coverage for an Apple iPhone, but you definitely can’t do this with a laptop. When I hit the pre-order button, it sent me to a new screen and on it was what I was looking for: the extended warranty plan.

There are still (as of October 11, 2015) problems with the way they present this. First, when you look at the pictograph (because why read the paragraph of description below it when you can just take a visual shortcut). The pictograph says: “Microsoft Complete for Surface.”

The first time I saw this, I blew right by it because I was thinking, “Oh, I’m not looking for the new Surface 4, I’m looking for the Surface Book.”

Then when I couldn’t find anything else, I went back and took time to read the writing below the pictograph. It said (and still says): “Microsoft Complete Accident Protection for Surface Book. Stay productive with extended protection and accidental coverage for your Surface, plus unlimited software support — all in one.” Below that is the price of $249. Below that is a box to check for “Add to cart.”

Again, the things most consumers are really interested in are nowhere to be found on the website. For anyone who pre-ordered and checked this box to get this Complete Accident Protection, that had to be like when a friend you don’t know very well asks to borrow your car and assures you that everything will be alright. You want to trust that person, but the stuff you don’t know gnaws a hole in your belly.

I could forgive Microsoft if they at least had some sort of additional information panel in a drop-down window. But they don’t.

Here are the problems with this particular part of the website:

1. Is this extended warranty for Surface and/or the Surface Book?
2. What exactly does “Complete Accident Protection” specifically mean?
3. How long does it last?
4. What if I accidentally damage my Surface Book and it can’t be fixed at that time? Do I get a replacement? Do I have to wait without a replacement unit until Microsoft fixes it?

From a marketing standpoint, the best thing Microsoft could do is to be consistent in what they tried to do: differentiate the Surface from the Surface Book. The reasons are clear: a) for people who already have the Surface, you want to entice them by presenting this as something dramatically different like the way that Apple differentiated the iPad Mini from the iPad, and b) you’re trying to convince people that you’re a legitimate laptop manufacturer instead of people continuing to believe that you only make hybrid tablets (i.e. the Surface model).

My guess is that whoever did the copywriting for this just figured to lump the Surface and the Surface Book into one short description. Sheer laziness. Bad move.

But to offer this insurance for $249 and not even mention how long it lasts is just awful. I hate to say that anyone should be fired, but whoever went over this part of the website and green-lighted it just has no clue what the average consumer is looking for.

As frustrating as the website experience was, the real-life experience was worse.

I called up the Boston Microsoft Store a couple of days after the public announcement of the Surface Book’s existence, and the customer service rep told me that she didn’t have any units for demo. Huh?

I understand that this laptop won’t be available until the end of October, but I’m guessing that they have already produced enough of them at least for their stores. If you’re going to start openly attacking Apple laptops and saying how awesome your 1st generation laptop is compared to Apple’s mature laptop line, you’d better be ready to put your money where your mouth is from the get-go. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

The rep told me to check back in a couple of days.

So I did. I literally called again two days later, and that’s where I started to get a queasy feeling. I called the store number and got stuck for a while on a recording telling me to get excited because “Windows 10 is coming.”

Huh? Windows 10 isn’t coming. It’s already arrived. Then when I finally got a store rep to pick up the line, he wasn’t sure if they had demo units in the store. He told me to hold on while he went to check.

Huh? So, you’re launching a brand new product that’s gotten a shocking number of positive reviews from tech experts, and Microsoft goes about touting how it’s 2 times faster than an Apple laptop. So, you have a hot product that’s generating a ton of buzz. But you don’t know if it’s on the floor of the store?

After several minutes, he got back on the line and told me that they had demo models in the store.

Despite all of this amateurish stuff by Microsoft, I was still incredibly excited about actually seeing the device. I wanted to buy it despite the fact that I hate the look of the Dynamic Fulcrum Hinge. Not only does it look clumsy, but it forces the laptop to have an awkward slanting gap/space between the screen and the keyboard.

One reason I really was excited about it was the amount of time Microsoft has spent talking about and showing this product’s keyboard. They advertise it as having “best-in class key travel” which is a fancy way of saying that when you push a key down while typing, it actually moves down far enough to be satisfying to the user.

I’ve tested hundreds of laptops, and I’m always shocked about how awful just about every keyboard is. That’s why I finally settled on my Dell XPS 15 (L501x). The keyboard on it not only has great “travel” but also it has a satisfying click when you’re typing. Why is that click important? Because it gives you almost haptic feedback to let you know that you actually pressed down on the key long enough for the character to appear on the screen.

In other words, I can close my eyes and type with full confidence of what’s going to appear on the screen. For people trying to decrease the amount of glare their eyes are taking in, aside from wearing special blue light filtering computer glasses, just closing your eyes or looking away from the screen while typing can do wonders for those computer screen glare headaches. That’s also why a little bit of clicky feedback is important in a great keyboard. It’s also why people universally hate “mushy” keyboards.

Dell doesn’t really talk about its keyboards at all which I’ve always felt has been a huge mistake because they have made the best keyboards in the business for a while. Microsoft seems to have learned from this Dell oversight and really pushed the keyboard’s excellence in its marketing campaign. So, I was incredibly excited to actually get my hands on this and try it.

When I went to the Boston Microsoft Store, I was shocked. It wasn’t my first time there. But it was my first look at the Surface Book. There was 1 demo model. Seriously. That’s like going into an Apple Store and them having 1 model of the iPhone 6s Plus. If you’re going to hype a product, then at least make it look like it’s something that people are fighting over to look at and touch.

But a single demo model on a small table diminished the impact of the product. How? Since the Microsoft Store also carries 1 demo model for each of the different laptop manufacturers who sell through the store (note: Dell is one of them), this means that Microsoft is tacitly implying that the Surface Book with a single demo model is no more important than the other manufacturers’ laptops which also have a single demo model on the store floor? Shocking.

If you don’t believe that it makes a difference, you just have to walk across Boylston Street to Apple’s flagship store in Boston. There on the first floor you’ll see 20 or more of every product the store carries. Why? Because Apple has realized that you want to minimize the time that customers have to wait to handle its products. People are impulsive, and the sooner they walk into a store and touch something, the more likely they are to buy it, especially if they walked into the store with the specific intent of looking at a targeted product.

So, I waited for a while until the couple in front of me finished looking at the Surface Book demo model. Here’s something else I realized, if you’re waiting to look at a laptop demo model and there’s a couple in front of you and the guy is this really tall and big athlete who knows next to nothing about laptops while his female significant other does, walk away for a while and return.

I’m a guy, and I’ve been an athlete my whole life, so I get that no guy wants to look like an idiot in front of his girlfriend. So, this guy just had to make it seem like he knew what he was talking about when he clearly didn’t. I felt sorry for his girlfriend who was clearly frustrated with all the posturing. Fortunately for me, I had hit the sweet spot on my iPhone playlist, so I could just chill while this couple in front of me took forever to look at the Surface Book.

But that was also good because it just built up the positive nervous energy of finally getting my hands on it.

Also, I spent some time talking to the Microsoft rep standing next to the demo model. What he said completely shocked me. He said that everyone who works at the Microsoft Store was taken aback at the amount of positive feedback about the Surface Book. He told me that this was completely unexpected and that the proof of this is how the demo model arrived at the store. It was bubble wrapped and at the bottom of a large box filled with a bunch of other new products they were receiving. I was stunned. Microsoft has this supposed Apple laptop “killer” and it can’t even ship the thing in it’s own product box?

From Microsoft’s presentation on Launch Day, it seemed that this was going to be a true Macbook/MacBook Air killer. And it gets delivered like an afterthought to Boston which has to be one of the most tech-savvy places in the U.S.? Whoa.

When the couple in front of me finally moved on, I approached the Surface Book demo model like velociraptor approaching its prey.

From the moment I touched it, I hated it, and I knew that I wasn’t going to buy it.

Here are the reasons:

1. the surface: this is no pun. The surface of this product is awful. Whoever designed it should also be fired. There is a reason why just about every company makes the surfaces (e.g. the surface of the laptop surrounding the keyboard and the touchpad) smooth: it allows your hands to glide over them. But the surface of the Surface Book is rough. I was completely shocked by this. Obviously, Microsoft was trying to copy Apple on this, but they made the surface way too rough. Not only does this make it annoying while typing, but it’s probably going to be difficult to clean when it gets dirty.
2. opening it: I was shocked how difficult this thing was to open. I have average-sized fingers for a guy, and I play classical guitar and piano, so my tactile sense and finger coordination is above-average. But I struggled to open the unit. People with extremely thin fingers (e.g. kindergarten students) should have no problems, but everyone else is going to find that the only easy way to open the Surface Book is to lift it off the table, rest it on its hinge, and then open it. How annoying is that? The design is just awful. The problem is that since the front edge of the laptop is completely square with just a narrow cutout on the bottom (keyboard) half of the unit, it’s just too narrow a space to easily stick your fingers into to open the unit. If they had also made a cutout on the upper part (monitor/tablet) of the unit, then this would have solved the problem. How does a laptop company make a high-end laptop that’s this difficult to open? Just shocking.
3. the thickness of the screen: it’s too thick and square. Maybe it’s because I have an iPad. But the thickness of the screen is accentuated by the square cut design of the edges. Basically, it’s the Surface adapted slightly and renamed as the Surface Book. Microsoft, seriously, you’re going to put a big angled gap between the monitor and the keyboard when this laptop’s closed, but you somehow thought that making all the edges square with a thick monitor would improve the aesthetics? Ugh.
4. the hinge: I hate it. Microsoft loves it, or at least they say they love it. But then again, Microsoft also said they loved Windows ME, Windows Vista, and Windows 8. And we all know how awful those experiences were. The hinge looks awful and functions terribly. I already mentioned how it puts a weird-looking gap between the two halves of the laptop. It makes it look like you accidentally left a a hard candy bar on the keyboard and then forced the laptop closed. But the absolute worst thing (and this was echoed by other people I talked with who were standing around the demo unit) is that when you open the Surface Book, it takes a little while for the screen to stop moving. I’m dead serious. The flexibility of the hinge is almost like a trampoline that you jump on. Each time you go up and down the distance is less until eventually you stop. That’s what happens here. The moment you open the screen and remove your fingers from it, the screen literally oscillates forward and make for a while. If you notice in Microsoft’s slick YouTube video, they open the Surface Book very slowly so it looks like you’re in outer space and opening the cargo hatch door on the International Space Station. But in real-time, this instability of the hinge is going to annoy the heck out of people. Some Microsoft fans will say that you just have to hold the screen half of the unit to make it stop oscillating when you first open it. Ridiculous. After paying almost $2000 (with insurance) for this unit, and then struggling to open it every time we want to use it, am I and other consumers really going to be happy either waiting for the monitor to finally settle into place or that we manually have to do the extra step of reaching out and steadying the monitor with our hands? Just awful.
5. the keyboard: Microsoft loves to talk about how quiet this keyboard is. And it is quiet, too quiet. It’s so quiet that there’s no feedback from it. It actually forced me to look at the screen the entire time I was typing to make sure that the characters actually appeared on the screen. I will say that the travel distance is nice, and the keys are well-machined. But the problem here is the same one that electronic piano keyboards have dealt with for years: trying to make a keyboard that gives just the right feedback to the user like a regular acoustic piano does. The knock against electronic piano keyboards is that you press down on a key and it feels mushy without any feedback. The big problem here is that Microsoft almost went completely against what we know works and they intentionally tried to make a keyboard that reduced feedback. I’m sure that the one group of people who are going to love this near-silent Microsoft Surface Book keyboard are the people around the person who’s actually using it (e.g. on an airplane, in an office, in a shared dorm room). For those people, this device is a godsend because they won’t have to listen to the clicking of the keyboard. But now Microsoft is trying to please the people who aren’t even using the device at the expense of the actual user? Bizarre.
6. writing on it with the pen: there was an interesting article written last week about how Apple had a bunch of Pixar animators try out their new big iPad called the iPad Pro. What surprised those animators is that Apple had done something unexpected: the company slightly “roughened” the surface of the screen so that it better replicated the feel of writing on paper. Guess what? Apple was smart. I didn’t fully realize how clever this was until I tried to write on the Surface Book’s screen with their new pen/stylus. The monitor surface was too smooth. Since it’s too smooth, it’s tough to quickly jot down notes that actually look like normal handwriting. The only way I could come close to doing this was to significantly slow down my writing speed, but even then the lack of any sort of friction on the screen made it impossible. Anyhow, no one wants to write slower.
7. the pen placement: I love that Microsoft made this laptop so the pen/stylus could be stuck magnetically to the side. It’s the kind of innovative thinking that makes me think the future is bright for Microsoft if they can actually get regular human beings to be involved in the product testing during the production design phase instead of after the unit is already fully created. But there are two major problems with the pen, and neither of them have to do with how well the pen actually works. The first problem is that it only magnetically sticks to the right side of the laptop keyboard half (the bottom half). Seriously, how inconvenient is that for left-handed people? Basically, if you’re left-handed, you won’t use this cool feature at all because it’s too difficult to reach your left hand across the keyboard to grab the pen that’s magnetically stuck to right side of the keyboard section. Would it have killed Microsoft to put a magnet on the left-side of the keyboard as well? Also, if you think about it, putting the internal magnet on the keyboard half of the unit is completely idiotic. Shouldn’t it be on the side of the monitor half of the unit (i.e. the upper half)? This also means that if someone detaches the monitor from the keyboard base (which just happens to be a big selling point of this unit), he/she is going to have to take the extra time to store the pen in one’s pocket or most likely they’ll end up putting it down and forgetting to pick it back up. The pen is made for the tablet/monitor portion of the Surface Book, so the internal magnet should have been placed where it would be most useful. A less clever option would have been to just put a slot into the monitor/tablet’s bezel are to physically store the pen in the monitor half of the unit. This makes it less accessible, but at least it reduces the chance that the user is going to put it down and forget to pick it up.
8. the rep: he was a nice guy. But he just didn’t seem to be too sure about anything. I even asked him a simple question about whether the Complete Protection warranty could be extended after the two years expired. He hesitated for a bit and then said no. A clear sign that he didn’t know the real answer. I would have preferred he check with someone and give me a solid answer. Then I threw him another softball and asked him if the AC adapter was also covered in the Complete Protection policy. This time he was honest and told me he didn’t know, and then we just stood there enveloped in an uncomfortable silence. I was waiting for him to go and ask a colleague to get a clear answer on this, but he never made a move. So, I just left the store. As a small note, I asked about the AC adapter coverage because there are whole threads of complaints on the Internet about Dell’s AC adapters malfunctioning after 1 year, and even if you get Dell’s complete protection, it doesn’t extend to the AC adapter. This happened to me three times during the four years I’ve had my Dell XPS 15.

The Microsoft Surface Book has all kinds of potential. But my overall opinion of it is that it’s pretty much a Surface that they decided to attach to a real keyboard instead of the super-thin keyboards that they’ve been peddling with the Surface tablets.

What someone needs to tell Microsoft is that with all the money it’s thrown at this product, you can’t just put a lot of great components into a laptop chassis and hope it sells like hotcakes.

Every step of the process has to be refined. That includes having multiple demo models ready as soon as product Launch Day happens. It’s better to be prepared in case there is a huge buzz as there has been for the Surface Book than to be completely unprepared. It also means making sure that all store recorded messages are up-to-date. Seriously, why is it my job to inform the Microsoft Store rep (which I did) that their store recorded messages are out of date?

Finally, Microsoft can’t look so far into the future that it forgets the very real immediate needs of the average consumer. We want a laptop that looks good, is easy to open, is stable, feels good when we’re using it, and is designed for our comfort. Then we care about how it performs.

As the saying goes, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” My first impression of the Microsoft Surface Book was bad. And now I’m pretty much forced to buy a new Dell XPS 15. I can’t say I’m completely thrilled with this upcoming event because Dell decided to go and screw up a winning keyboard to imitate the chiclet-style keyboard that Apple uses. Not only is the responsiveness actually worse on the new keyboards than my 4-year-old model, but the keys are also not smooth on top which slows down typing. Heavy sigh…

I have a general rule that I don’t jump and buy a first-generation tech product. That’s why I didn’t get the iPhone 4, the iPhone 5, the iPhone 6 or the original iPad. And that rule is as solid as the rule that you should only consider getting every other operating system that Microsoft offers. Don’t believe me? Windows 2000 was good, Windows ME was awful, Windows XP was very good, Windows Vista was awful, Windows 7 was also very good, Windows 8 was strange, and now Windows 10 is supposed to be very good from all the reviews I’ve read.

I guess the rule of not getting a first-generation product now extends to Microsoft’s laptop. If Microsoft ever gets its act together on this, they have a product which Apple is going to be forced to copy major elements from. But as of right now, the new hinge system of the Surface Book has no track record and it doesn’t work so well brand new, and since that most basic of elements of a laptop is messed up, how can I or anyone really spend a lot of money on it? You don’t blow $80,000 on a new Tesla Model S sedan and then think it’s going to be fine if the doors don’t open and close properly, so why would anyone think that this is okay for a laptop?

Great first effort, but not good enough. But there’s always next time.