Microsoft says it's finally fixing the biggest problems with its Surface Book laptop and Surface Pro tablet
On Wednesday, Microsoft Surface boss Panos Panay apologized for the delay in an official blog post, promising that the new software patches coming today would begin to address the issues across both the Surface Book and the Surface Pro 4 tablet.
"I read the blogs, I read the comments, I read social media, I read the forums…and so does the team. We love the energy. We're listening and channeling that feedback directly into our products," Panay wrote.
That update is starting to go out via Windows Update today. It consists of new drivers and patches to make the Surface line work better with the Intel processor and display drivers, which The Verge reports cause power management problems in the devices' hardware.
When the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 launched last Fall, a whole slew of deal-breaking bugs came with them, including random crashes and the dreaded blue screen of death - I personally went through three Surface Pro 4 tablets in the quest to find a single error-free unit.
Microsoft originally promised that those bugs were restricted to pre-release units sent to the press, but the problems turned out to far more widespread, affecting more and more customers - even prominent Microsoft blogger Paul Thurrott slammed the company's lack of response over the issue, dubbing this fiasco "Surfacegate."
A software update to the Surface Book released in late January 2016 annoyed users when it didn't do much to alleviate these issues.
I actually put my Surface Pro 4 in a drawer while I waited for all of this to be resolved, so I can't test the new software update immediately. But it's good to see that Microsoft is finally showing signs of wanting to fix this problem.
In the meanwhile, Microsoft is hopefully filing these lessons away: It's harder to take an Apple-like control over both hardware and software than it looks. People want reliability.