Posted on 10/20/2017 1:19:57 PM PDT by dayglored
Just a few days ago, Microsoft revealed details of the Surface Book 2 which is due to launch in November. But before the device is even available, it has been dealt a blow by Consumer Reports.
Earlier in the year, the review group said that problems with reliability meant that it was impossible for it to recommend any Microsoft laptop or tablet. Now Consumer Reports says that this extends to the Surface Book 2, meaning that the device will not be recommended.
While hardly the end of the world for Microsoft, this will still come as bad news. The company expressed disappointment in Consumer Reports' original decision, saying: "We don't believe these findings accurately reflect Surface owners' true experiences or capture the performance and reliability improvements made with every Surface generation."
Microsoft is likely to be similarly disappointed with Consumer Reports' statement about the Surface Book 2. Speaking to Benzinga, Consumer Reports' spokesperson James McQueen said:
We will evaluate the performance of the Microsoft Surface Book 2 once we get it into our labs next month for testing, but we will not be able to recommend it. Our decision to withhold our recommendation of all Microsoft laptops and tablets is still in effect.
It looks as though Microsoft has an uphill battle on its hands.
(Excerpt) Read more at betanews.com ...
Looks like James Comey found a new job.
LOL! Good one!
Nah, CR has been just as hard on Apple too. I think they're just a bunch of malcontents who don't know nearly enough about computers to evaluate them properly.
Possible they found serious problems with the first model and have specs that indicate the next model hasn’t done enough to address the issues...
Yeah, they figure the Surface Book 2 is basically just an upgrade, not an overhaul, of the product.
They claim their "not recommended" rating is based on their evidence that 25% of Surface customers reported serious hardware-related problems with the systems -- breakage, dead, hangs, random shutdowns, crashes, etc. -- within the first two years of ownership. Microsoft's response was that Consumer Reports didn't appreciate the product's appeal to the customers.
Personally I think Microsoft's design is based on the assumption that folks will want to buy a new one every few years. It's not all that different from Apple's philosophy, actually. Apple makes their money off the hardware sales, so they have to move physical product on a regular basis. Microsoft tried the same thing with Surface.
Consumer Reports just came out on October 16th with a list of five "best" smartphones where they listed the Samsung Galaxy S8, S8 Plus, and the Galaxy S7 and "better in performance than the two new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 plus" . . . and then hid the actual article behind a paywall, where you had to subscribe to Consumer Reports. A news article in a South Korean Tech journal Yonhap, with the FUD headline of "Samsung's Galaxy S8 tops U.S. consumer review", which picked that up and crowed that even last year's Samung Galaxy S7 was faster in performance than Apple's New iPhone 8 citing Consumer Reports as a source, then the US's BGR tech journal, quoting the South Korean magazine, repeated the claim with a FUD headline "Consumer Reports says old Samsung phones are better than Apple’s brand new iPhone 8."
Neither of those two actually linked to the CR article. When you go to CR, and read between the lines, and parse what they were saying about phones that last between charges,
It turns out the ONLY "performance" Consumer Reports was reporting on was relative battery life performance, not actual phone speed or any other test of actual phone processor or GPU performance. LOL! They're listing purely battery life specs. Oops.
"Let's see, of all the ratings, which one shows the Galaxy beating the iPhone? Battery life? Okay, then, we'll publish that one."
No agenda there, no bias there, oh no. Couldn't be.
Sheesh.
So did CR set the display brightness the same for that comparison? Screen brightness affects current drain considerably. And current draw in modern semiconductors is almost directly related to how many internal capacitances are being charged and discharged per second as the "ones" and "zeros" change around. (There's negligible static current consumption.) So one has to also be careful about what applications one is running, including background ones. Any active process will be drawing current proportional to its CPU/GPU usage.
So is the iPhone CPU/GPU performance better than the Galaxy's? If so, all else equal, it's gonna draw more current because it's manipulating more data per unit time. "Smart" monitoring and control of power consumption can do a lot to mitigate that, of course; such as slowing down when waiting for the user to do something, etc. Standard stuff in battery powered devices.
Yep - it's a disposable world we live in today - I'm typing on a 7 year old computer with Win 7, my cell phone is 2-1/2 years old, and my wife says some of my clothes are older than our marriage of 26 years (I do have a Unit jacket, from the 2917th ESC, that is 40 years old from when I was stationed in Italy).
Ironic that many of the folks that always have the latest and greatest technologies are also on the Dole....
I have a fast desktop machine, a nice 17” laptop and a Surface 3 Pro. While I had a Surface Pro 2 and liked it, the battery life was not really very good and it was a little thick for a tablet.
Well, the Surface 3 Pro is so nice that my wife got one too. We both love them. They have long life batteries, boot pretty quickly and run anything that our other machines can handle, although they are certainly not gaming machines.
These are small light and powerful. I don’t go anywhere without it, usually carrying it under my arm.
They are too expensive but sure are nice machines.
>>Which apps won’t Windows 10 S be able to run? Any apps that are not currently available in the Windows Store will not be able to be installed or run. That includes Apple’s iTunes, Google’s Chrome browser and the full versions of Adobe’s Acrobat, Photoshop and the rest of the Creative Suite – or anything else that’s installed via the traditional Windows 7 or earlier way .<<
As I said, the Windows App Store is a desert. I write my own stuff using MSAccess and VBS (and MS provides a ton more tools such as PowerShell, Perl and others) — none can be used.
Whoever came up with this idea in the delusional belief they are the same as Android or Apple should be publicly flogged and otherwise treated like a malware writer.
This kills the SB market. Probably for good.
MS took a knee.
>>These are small light and powerful. I don’t go anywhere without it, usually carrying it under my arm.<<
I assume you were not given Win 10S .
No I was not given Win 10S, I wouldn’t touch that with a 10ft pole.
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