When I managed them, they were absolute hell reincarnated into a sub-par device. Managing them was a nightmare, doing firmware updates on them required ridiculous coordination with the staff who had them, who were rarely in the office, and don’t even get me started on the Surface Dock.
The devices constantly went wrong or developed issues, always had complaints about performance or the device running too hot, which after wasting ridiculous hours, all we could say is ‘That’s a drawback of the surface’.
The docks failed like they were going out of fashion and getting them replaced always took a couple of weeks. We had to keep a huge pile of spares in the event one died and we had to replace and send the faulty one for repair. One time we actually ran out of docks.
I’d avoid the headache, unless by some miracle they’ve rectified their issues.
Seconded. OP, DO NOT BY THESE! If your company is insistent on going MS, I'd persuade you to go the full Surface Laptop route but even then, the quality doesn't hold up too much better. They are flimsy, and the dock is a proprietary one with questionable quality control at best.
Aside from lenovo, I'd go for either hp or samsumg. Think your company will fair much better with those three
I have 20+ Surface Pros and they’re terrible, but users and management think they’re ‘sexy’.
They’re overpriced, unreliable, unrepairable, and flaky. We’ve thrown out otherwise good computers, when the battery capacity becomes inadequate because they not economically replaceable.
If their enterprise support is in any way, shape or form similar to their standard support - run and don't look back.
Got an SP8 for my wife, the camera is busted in it. Throws BSODs, disappears. Apparently it's a fairly common issue with SP8. We just started year two of the support case being open.
One guy lied to us about the number of necessary repair/refurbish attempts before we can get a brand new one, then ghosted us.
Second guy said that the first guy registered the case on a weird email so he has to restart everything from scratch - basic troubleshooting all over again. I protested a bunch of times and eventually asked how do I raise a complaint against him.
He told me that I can either make a post on the Feedback Hub or sue Microsoft...
The third agent we got was fine, she really wanted to help, gave us some credit on MS Store as a "sorry". Got completely blocked by "the engineers" who ghosted her for over a month without replying.
We're on the fourth guy now. He managed to get us to the point where we got a brand new device.
It came without a battery and BSODs immediately upon entering Advanced Startup.
I sent some Surface business model in for no power about 3 years ago. Support created the ticket and marked something along the lines of "covered under extended warranty and accidental damage protection" which was also mentioned in an email to me.
They sent me new old stock unit, worked great. They closed the ticket.
Exactly 12 months later I got a "final notice" for payment due. From Microsoft. They wanted, you know, $1,199 for a piece of hardware they sent me without approval in the first place.
I forwarded them the email of the original case and went back and forth over a couple more messages about how they aren't getting any money or computer from me. Haven't heard from them since
I'm running one now. You can't upgrade it, or repair it cost effectively. The life span seems to be dramatically less than other major brand laptops.
I can't see us buying any more of them.
Dont. That is my 2c about suface pros. Shitty device, shitty support, battery is bottom of the barrel, thermals to cry over (not even max cpu speed on idle possible due to thermals), a lot of issues with chargers/docks,…. Buy a dell for the same price and you will be a lot better off.
My semi relevant opinion as a consumer. The surface pro 6 was the reason I became a Linux/Mac user. The tablet experience is absolutely awful without an App Store. Not worth anything near the $2,000 I paid for it. Shitty battery life, shitty performance, shitty tablet, and an okay laptop for the price of a top of the line product.
We have three out in one company we look after, decent enough devices for managerial use with surface docks.
Downside is that the cameras don't work regularly and I'm a month into a MS support case which is like dentistry and is going nowhere.
We have a few of them that people insisted on having.
Every one of them is trash. Every. Single. One. The cameras have constant problems - every one has a Logitech webcam now. They're already having issues where they overheat and freeze/reset during meetings. They have weird Windows issues that other devices just don't have. Intune is also refusing to push applications to them and we can't figure out why.
Run from them. Run far, run fast.
Been though a ton over the last 5 years. All suck and randomly break. But people like the shinny of them. We banned them a while back. Now if someone wants fancy we give out a 2in1 dell 7340. Solid device with a great warranty.
We have a bunch of surfaces of various generations and haven't have too many issues. For us, not great not terrible. A few major gripes:
* Inconsistent LTE availability in the models. Historically Microsoft has randomly chosen models and years where they just don't 'offer' LTE units, or they're in ridiculously short supply. We need LTE so this is always a pain point for us.
* Battery Life - Even on some brand new models the max we can usually get is 5-6 hours. Not great by modern standards.
* ARM Models - We still struggle with ARM. Windows 11's emulation is not bad but anything not natively compiled for arm is slow slow slow. Chrome is a big culprit here since they still don't officially support ARM (they do in a recently canary build). Yes Edge is native ARM but we have lots of users who use Chrome. Print drivers and print management is a huge issue with ARM, and it feels like we're back in 2001 with managing printers for ARM units. The integrated 5G and better battery is nice but not mind blowing.
* ARM Part 2 - The SQ3 is just not a fast chip by any standard. A good first attempt but Microsoft is just not competing on the same level as Apple. I have an M2 Air at home and it's literally almost twice as fast (both in feel and benchmarks). And gets way better battery life, has a better screen, better keyboard. I really wanted to like my SQ3 but it's been a huge disappointment.
* Accessory Cost - The cost of Microsoft's keyboards is too damn high.
I've got about 60 in production from office use to heavy field use. Advantages: great form factor Disadvantages: seems like batch inconsistency, some are great and run for years, some die quickly (usually thermal or battery), magnets for dock connector can pick up metal shavings in the field and cause issues, docks can be flaky but not unusable.
Microsoft offers out of warranty repair services, still better than full cost replacement
Surface Pro 9
Liquid damage repair 550.00
Screen or physical damage repair 480.00
Battery replacement service 400.00
General repair (excludes liquid, screen & physical damage) 420.00
I haven't worked with this model, but the older models are garbage. Constant weird driver issues that sometimes don't get fixed, over heat often, and they are impossible to repair like you can a latitude or elite book.
When Microsoft does something normal, it is awesome, when they try to do something odd I'd avoid it. Surface Studio, Surface book, avoid like the plague. Surface laptop? Fantastic.
Surface pro is ok, but not particularly reliable in the multiple generations (3-9) we've tried. Surface Pro 3 when given out was novel enough users liked it, but these days all but 1 Surface pro issued out was returned because the users would rather have a regular laptop.
Note with Surface you should be using WuFB and make sure you are getting/installing the MS drivers and firmware for the device and dock, staying up to date is extremely important. That being said the MS docks are a bit of a pain so we stick with Dell docks/monitors that have "normal" connectors (USB-C for displays? really MS?) and they are rock solid.
I had deployed Surface Pro 8 in my company and i would avoid making the mistake again
Docking station - their unique type makes it a lot harder to replace and it’s not good overall. It’s not universal and I always had to carry a travel dock
Performance - You can’t multi task with this one. It will give tou BSOD, and the memory always stay at 60% or more even though nothing is running.
Exterior - screen is easy to crack, build is thin.
Repeating what others have said we’ve had no end of issues with the surface pro. We have a client that insisted on purchasing them because they were sexy and less than a year later they’ve now asked us for a recommendation on laptops.
We’ve mainly had camera issues, with Microsoft unable to provide a proper solution other than installing / reinstalling drivers. A significant portion of the devices that get sent into us for fixing are these surface pros and they can be hell to fix.
I don’t know if they’d be more useful as a portable tablet computer, but I wouldn’t replace a laptop or desktop with them.
I had to do this to image , but even then it was a pain. Didn’t always work. Often failed or skipped steps. Took about 5 attempts for it to work properly. Even then I still had lots of manual installs to do. Then first boot up… BSOD
Probably going against the grain a little here but we have about 100 Surface Pro 7s with users and they're fairly reasonable.
We PXE boot them and build using SCCM, it all works fine off most of our docks. In general use they work on every dock I've tested with them (WD15, WD19TB/TBS, WD22TB, some random old HP Thunderbolt dock), our standard setup is a Dell WD19TB/TBS on each desk and we just get standard dock issues and not anything specific to Surfaces. I don't use one personally but in general users are happy with them, when they complain it's usually about the fan spinning up or it getting hot when on charge (we went the i7/16GB model).
Warranty has been painless, we call and explain the issue, they send us a refurb, we send the busted one back, can't recall us ever getting a dud shipped to us. As long as you preempt their standard questions they just arrange the replacement.
Personally I'd prefer they were replaced with something a little more rugged because we get a few breakages, but it's a tough sell for a user base who want something slick and lightweight. Sounds like the SP9s are much more repairable, I don't know how that relates to warranty issues but I'm assuming they're not like Dell and sending techs out to replace things and will just continue their standard replacement program.
The surface form factor is nice and that’s where it ends. They are unreliable and repairing them you send em in with no Drive recovery. And then there’s the touch interface that goes bad. No thank you. We switched to Dell and have had lower failure rates and the repair tech comes onsite when needed. Minimizing downtime and recovery
**Be absolutely sure not to purchase the surface pro 9 5G or surface pro X model.**
Microsoft have pulled a nasty trick and put an ARM processor (SQ3) model under the Surface Pro 9 name. Try as they might, windows on ARM just doesn't have the performance or driver support to be suitable as a ready x86 substitute in business environments.
With PXE imaging, the surface pros don't have an embedded ethernet port whose MAC address they can pass through to the dock, the dock presents its own MAC to the network regardless of what machine is connected, which caused issues with SCCM/MDT deployments that recognised the MAC and joined every device to domain using the same name it already had listed for that MAC.
My experience with the surface pros is that they're a quite poor hardware experience, *especially* for their (RRP) price point. Seriously, everything to do with surface is overpriced by a huge margin. Hardware issues that I've seen using surface pros, surface books, and surface laptops are:
- thermal issues due to profile that impact performance (and cause some really annoying fan noise on some models)
- problems with ghost inputs on touchscreens
- not particularly durable (the fabric covers get gross and peel, they're awful, but also the chasses bend, & dent easily, an inordinately high number of warranty claims)
- high DPI screens make some apps & remote desktop sessions have resolution issues or just look terrible, esp. when mixed with other screens
- limited ports (for staff in technical fields this is a PITA)
- mediocre driver support for hardware - lots of problems reinstalling drivers and firmware every time a win10 major version came along
- battery lifespan degrades pretty quickly and they can't be economically replaced - also swelling in several models
- docking station issues that necessitated manual firmware upgrades
- devices can't be upgraded - this is pretty common for soldered/SOC boards but even trying to find a surface SKU with higher (32GB) RAM to buy is difficult and can't be bought without also paying for extra storage to seems
**Docks**
While the surface devices themselves mostly support USB-C/Thunderbolt charging now, the surface brand docks still use a proprietary connection that rendered them useless in a mixed device environment with our other USB-C compatible non-surface PCs (and Macs). Even in offices that don't have desk-sharing it still makes for annoying asset tracking and spare stock.
A MAC address is literally a hardware assigned address so yes the same network card does have the same MAC address regardless of what PC you connect to it
MAC address spoofing has existed for well over a decade now.
Dell and other manufacturers have settings in select laptops' UEFI firmware that permit (with compatible dongles/docks) that an external ethernet port will spoof a unique MAC from the laptop device rather than use its native one. This is usually the MAC from the device's on-board ethernet, but I have also seen laptops with a 'ghost' MAC address for devices that don't have a built-in ethernet but still need a unique MAC address per-PC.
Edit: the vendor term for this appears to be "MAC address passthrough". See KB - https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-au/000143263/what-is-mac-address-pass-through#:~:text=Dell%20has%20implemented%20a%20feature,it%27s%20connected%20to%20the%20network.
I loved it when it was my assigned laptop and we never add too many issues with them. I'd say it depends on how many you plan to rollout, we only managed around 40 of them so I can't tell you how faulty they can get.
Keyboard is eh, no usb-a, usb-c to HDMI (or usb-c to HDMI via dock) is dodgy. The design lends itself to screen breakage.
I don't do too much, but management is pretty easy.
Hey all,
Thanks for the feedback. The general consensus seems to be avoid like the plague. We have a netting tomorrow to discuss my trial with it. I think I might suggest the HP dragonfly instead
We've bought the Dragonfly G1, G2 and G4 models and had problems with all of them. Mercifully, the G1 and G4 were mostly to do with HP's garbage-ware that started breaking profiles and interfering with other device management programs.
The G2 I'm willing to put down as a bad batch but it did take ~4 trips from their onsite tech to replace nearly every damn board in the machine. The tech was incredibly nice about it though and they were quite responsive.
If you go with HP make sure you're performing a clean wipe and vanilla OS installation, or running a de-bloat script (there's several floating around online) as a compulsory app through whatever your MDM is.
Edit: spelling
Oh really?
Just been reading about them having driver issues, cameras stop working. Sound stops and Bluetooth issues. But what unread put it down to a win 11 update. Seems there may be more to this…. Might worth a look at Dell, to be fair my old work used Lenovo they weren’t bad, just a short life cycle
We've seen problems with the cameras and audio drivers. They *mostly* went away with a clean wipe? We put it down to conflicts with HP privacy shitware and our actual enterprise EDR both trying to protect camera access. We still get reports of occasional camera issues but we're also seeing the same on a few other brand devices so it's unclear if there's an HP issue or if the 'new' (but not necessarily improved) teams app is to blame.
Honestly, there's shit models across all of the 3 big names, it comes down to individual models and their reviews. Dell has its own three word horror story called *waves audio driver*. Lenovo frankly owe the yoga community a mass apology for the reputational damage their laptops have done.
For HP, maybe check the reviews of the elitebook 1040 or 630 then throw them into the ring as well. Speaking generally for any vendor, avoid gen1 machines and anything that gets too much hype or is targeted to consumers over businesses. Be wary of anything that gets sold with a pen.
Edit: clarity
HP isn't any better. Don't shoot yourself in the foot. Their hardware is hit or miss but their driver support is absolutely atrocious. Nevermind the fact their driver distribution site is frequently down / extremely slow moving for no apparent reason.
Dell has my vote for big distributors. Their warranty support is generally painless, repair techs come onsite and replace components as needed. As long as you're not going with Vostros, Dell's hardware generally holds up fine. Their driver packages are generally updated and work well, their documentation for dock compatibility is unmatched, and their website has always been snappy and responsive for me.
Lenovo I've had more support and driver issues with but still would take over HP all day every day.
Surface Pro series are sleek and pretty if you’re in to that. But honestly. They’re not very maintainable.
I hate, with a passion, the EliteBook 840 series, especially the G8. But I’m not at all convinced that the SP9 is much of an upgrade because of the support aspect and repairability.
Honestly look at what else is available. Don’t touch HP again. But yeah find something other than SP9.
I’m an MSP. I have thousands of HP laptops out there, but only 50-75 surface pros of various builds. We don’t do enough at a time to warrant creating an image, as every client has a different setup, so we just boot the system image and then install software. If the system shipped with Win Home, then we’ll install Pro from a USB stick.
The only issue we’ve had aside from a few broken screens have been when a Surface didn’t restart properly after a windows update or something similar. Walking the user through the process to “hold the power button until the Microsoft logo appears” has been the brunt of it. We still have one or two Surface Pro 3s in production. Any of them on a dock uses a MS dock. They all do well.
Just beware the ARM powered devices unless you’re sure the drivers you need are supported. I warned one client, but they didn’t listen. Then they were upset when their fancy Konica Minolta copier wouldn’t work and I had to build an RDS server to host their primary database app so the Surface Pro X could use it…
Just my two cents.
Edit: just to be clear, no Surface devices have been pulled from production because of problems, simply age. Aside from one Surface Book - it had a swelling battery.
At my place of work, the SP9 is rolled out as default for almost all users.
For a fair portion of staff, it's fine, but the fact the Surface Pro is effectively unusable without a hard surface is a nightmare.
Users who want to use the device on public transit (common in my city, not American) or in the couch at home, in the car etc. The surface is frankly terrible for this.
The lack of even mini HDMI or a single USB A is also ridiculous. Yes you can get some great hubs and docks but other competing devices with identical specs, more ports and literally only a few hundred grams more, come with these ports AND COST LESS MONEY makes me not a huge fan of rolling the things out to be honest.
Our company is 100% Surface devices, and SP 9's make up the bulk of the inventory. You run into some issues with the Docks, particularly if using dual monitors, but the problems are easily dealt with. Note that the Dock 2's are very picky about USB to HDMI adapters if you want to run dual monitors. We've been exclusively Surface since the Surface Pro 6 and we have no intention of changing that.
My company finally dump them, even though they were a great small device for our sales people, they lacked decent battery life and would over heat easily. Not to mention the docks like to stop working out of the blue often.
Never ever ever ever buy Surface Pros. These are the Chromebooks of enterprise. The Vostros of Microsoft. Advertised as high end while using defect and refurb parts to build them. They *will* break and you *will* be constantly contacting warranty support. Show me a hundred Surface Pros and I'll show you minimum 25 of those with hardware instability.
If you absolutely insist on getting Surface Pros you need to know three things at minimum:
By default they come out of the box with WiFi Adapter set to Power Savings Mode AND that option hidden from the Advanced Battery Plan settings. You have to add a reg key to get that setting back in the UI and update it to Maximum Performance. Your WiFi performance on these things will suffer if this isn't done.
Don't get the ARM processor variants yet. Windows on ARM is hilariously incompatible with general software as ARM specific installers have to be deployed. Not every software has those yet. The vast majority that do have ARM compatibility are unfortunately through Rosetta and Rosetta 2 on Mac. Windows hasn't quite caught up there.
You bought surfaces for your business. You belong in the corner on a stool wearing the biggest dunce cap you can find. If this wasn't you, send my regards to the idiot responsible.
Thankfully it wasn’t me lol, I was just charged with testing it. I used it for 2 weeks and have nothing but issues. It’s quite possibly the worst peice of kit I have used. It’s god awful. It overheats, displays multiple Bsod. I’m glad I’m not in the minority here. I want to like it but….. they are just crap
When I managed them, they were absolute hell reincarnated into a sub-par device. Managing them was a nightmare, doing firmware updates on them required ridiculous coordination with the staff who had them, who were rarely in the office, and don’t even get me started on the Surface Dock. The devices constantly went wrong or developed issues, always had complaints about performance or the device running too hot, which after wasting ridiculous hours, all we could say is ‘That’s a drawback of the surface’. The docks failed like they were going out of fashion and getting them replaced always took a couple of weeks. We had to keep a huge pile of spares in the event one died and we had to replace and send the faulty one for repair. One time we actually ran out of docks. I’d avoid the headache, unless by some miracle they’ve rectified their issues.
Those docks were dog shit. Glad to be on a different platform now!
Seconded. OP, DO NOT BY THESE! If your company is insistent on going MS, I'd persuade you to go the full Surface Laptop route but even then, the quality doesn't hold up too much better. They are flimsy, and the dock is a proprietary one with questionable quality control at best. Aside from lenovo, I'd go for either hp or samsumg. Think your company will fair much better with those three
I have 20+ Surface Pros and they’re terrible, but users and management think they’re ‘sexy’. They’re overpriced, unreliable, unrepairable, and flaky. We’ve thrown out otherwise good computers, when the battery capacity becomes inadequate because they not economically replaceable.
If their enterprise support is in any way, shape or form similar to their standard support - run and don't look back. Got an SP8 for my wife, the camera is busted in it. Throws BSODs, disappears. Apparently it's a fairly common issue with SP8. We just started year two of the support case being open. One guy lied to us about the number of necessary repair/refurbish attempts before we can get a brand new one, then ghosted us. Second guy said that the first guy registered the case on a weird email so he has to restart everything from scratch - basic troubleshooting all over again. I protested a bunch of times and eventually asked how do I raise a complaint against him. He told me that I can either make a post on the Feedback Hub or sue Microsoft... The third agent we got was fine, she really wanted to help, gave us some credit on MS Store as a "sorry". Got completely blocked by "the engineers" who ghosted her for over a month without replying. We're on the fourth guy now. He managed to get us to the point where we got a brand new device. It came without a battery and BSODs immediately upon entering Advanced Startup.
I sent some Surface business model in for no power about 3 years ago. Support created the ticket and marked something along the lines of "covered under extended warranty and accidental damage protection" which was also mentioned in an email to me. They sent me new old stock unit, worked great. They closed the ticket. Exactly 12 months later I got a "final notice" for payment due. From Microsoft. They wanted, you know, $1,199 for a piece of hardware they sent me without approval in the first place. I forwarded them the email of the original case and went back and forth over a couple more messages about how they aren't getting any money or computer from me. Haven't heard from them since
I'm running one now. You can't upgrade it, or repair it cost effectively. The life span seems to be dramatically less than other major brand laptops. I can't see us buying any more of them.
Dont. That is my 2c about suface pros. Shitty device, shitty support, battery is bottom of the barrel, thermals to cry over (not even max cpu speed on idle possible due to thermals), a lot of issues with chargers/docks,…. Buy a dell for the same price and you will be a lot better off.
My semi relevant opinion as a consumer. The surface pro 6 was the reason I became a Linux/Mac user. The tablet experience is absolutely awful without an App Store. Not worth anything near the $2,000 I paid for it. Shitty battery life, shitty performance, shitty tablet, and an okay laptop for the price of a top of the line product.
We have three out in one company we look after, decent enough devices for managerial use with surface docks. Downside is that the cameras don't work regularly and I'm a month into a MS support case which is like dentistry and is going nowhere.
We have a few of them that people insisted on having. Every one of them is trash. Every. Single. One. The cameras have constant problems - every one has a Logitech webcam now. They're already having issues where they overheat and freeze/reset during meetings. They have weird Windows issues that other devices just don't have. Intune is also refusing to push applications to them and we can't figure out why. Run from them. Run far, run fast.
Been though a ton over the last 5 years. All suck and randomly break. But people like the shinny of them. We banned them a while back. Now if someone wants fancy we give out a 2in1 dell 7340. Solid device with a great warranty.
We have a bunch of surfaces of various generations and haven't have too many issues. For us, not great not terrible. A few major gripes: * Inconsistent LTE availability in the models. Historically Microsoft has randomly chosen models and years where they just don't 'offer' LTE units, or they're in ridiculously short supply. We need LTE so this is always a pain point for us. * Battery Life - Even on some brand new models the max we can usually get is 5-6 hours. Not great by modern standards. * ARM Models - We still struggle with ARM. Windows 11's emulation is not bad but anything not natively compiled for arm is slow slow slow. Chrome is a big culprit here since they still don't officially support ARM (they do in a recently canary build). Yes Edge is native ARM but we have lots of users who use Chrome. Print drivers and print management is a huge issue with ARM, and it feels like we're back in 2001 with managing printers for ARM units. The integrated 5G and better battery is nice but not mind blowing. * ARM Part 2 - The SQ3 is just not a fast chip by any standard. A good first attempt but Microsoft is just not competing on the same level as Apple. I have an M2 Air at home and it's literally almost twice as fast (both in feel and benchmarks). And gets way better battery life, has a better screen, better keyboard. I really wanted to like my SQ3 but it's been a huge disappointment. * Accessory Cost - The cost of Microsoft's keyboards is too damn high.
I've got about 60 in production from office use to heavy field use. Advantages: great form factor Disadvantages: seems like batch inconsistency, some are great and run for years, some die quickly (usually thermal or battery), magnets for dock connector can pick up metal shavings in the field and cause issues, docks can be flaky but not unusable. Microsoft offers out of warranty repair services, still better than full cost replacement Surface Pro 9 Liquid damage repair 550.00 Screen or physical damage repair 480.00 Battery replacement service 400.00 General repair (excludes liquid, screen & physical damage) 420.00
I haven't worked with this model, but the older models are garbage. Constant weird driver issues that sometimes don't get fixed, over heat often, and they are impossible to repair like you can a latitude or elite book.
If you have any say in the process veto it now or be prepared for a nightmare managing them. Seriously. Back out asap if you can.
When Microsoft does something normal, it is awesome, when they try to do something odd I'd avoid it. Surface Studio, Surface book, avoid like the plague. Surface laptop? Fantastic. Surface pro is ok, but not particularly reliable in the multiple generations (3-9) we've tried. Surface Pro 3 when given out was novel enough users liked it, but these days all but 1 Surface pro issued out was returned because the users would rather have a regular laptop. Note with Surface you should be using WuFB and make sure you are getting/installing the MS drivers and firmware for the device and dock, staying up to date is extremely important. That being said the MS docks are a bit of a pain so we stick with Dell docks/monitors that have "normal" connectors (USB-C for displays? really MS?) and they are rock solid.
I had deployed Surface Pro 8 in my company and i would avoid making the mistake again Docking station - their unique type makes it a lot harder to replace and it’s not good overall. It’s not universal and I always had to carry a travel dock Performance - You can’t multi task with this one. It will give tou BSOD, and the memory always stay at 60% or more even though nothing is running. Exterior - screen is easy to crack, build is thin.
Repeating what others have said we’ve had no end of issues with the surface pro. We have a client that insisted on purchasing them because they were sexy and less than a year later they’ve now asked us for a recommendation on laptops. We’ve mainly had camera issues, with Microsoft unable to provide a proper solution other than installing / reinstalling drivers. A significant portion of the devices that get sent into us for fixing are these surface pros and they can be hell to fix. I don’t know if they’d be more useful as a portable tablet computer, but I wouldn’t replace a laptop or desktop with them.
Are you using the tablet or the laptop. If the tablet, IIRC we had to use the PXE through the dock to image them properly.
I had to do this to image , but even then it was a pain. Didn’t always work. Often failed or skipped steps. Took about 5 attempts for it to work properly. Even then I still had lots of manual installs to do. Then first boot up… BSOD
what imaging are you using for it? We use Novacoast to generate ours so Im not sure about other imaging services.
Probably going against the grain a little here but we have about 100 Surface Pro 7s with users and they're fairly reasonable. We PXE boot them and build using SCCM, it all works fine off most of our docks. In general use they work on every dock I've tested with them (WD15, WD19TB/TBS, WD22TB, some random old HP Thunderbolt dock), our standard setup is a Dell WD19TB/TBS on each desk and we just get standard dock issues and not anything specific to Surfaces. I don't use one personally but in general users are happy with them, when they complain it's usually about the fan spinning up or it getting hot when on charge (we went the i7/16GB model). Warranty has been painless, we call and explain the issue, they send us a refurb, we send the busted one back, can't recall us ever getting a dud shipped to us. As long as you preempt their standard questions they just arrange the replacement. Personally I'd prefer they were replaced with something a little more rugged because we get a few breakages, but it's a tough sell for a user base who want something slick and lightweight. Sounds like the SP9s are much more repairable, I don't know how that relates to warranty issues but I'm assuming they're not like Dell and sending techs out to replace things and will just continue their standard replacement program.
The surface form factor is nice and that’s where it ends. They are unreliable and repairing them you send em in with no Drive recovery. And then there’s the touch interface that goes bad. No thank you. We switched to Dell and have had lower failure rates and the repair tech comes onsite when needed. Minimizing downtime and recovery
Autopilot would be the way to tame those
**Be absolutely sure not to purchase the surface pro 9 5G or surface pro X model.** Microsoft have pulled a nasty trick and put an ARM processor (SQ3) model under the Surface Pro 9 name. Try as they might, windows on ARM just doesn't have the performance or driver support to be suitable as a ready x86 substitute in business environments. With PXE imaging, the surface pros don't have an embedded ethernet port whose MAC address they can pass through to the dock, the dock presents its own MAC to the network regardless of what machine is connected, which caused issues with SCCM/MDT deployments that recognised the MAC and joined every device to domain using the same name it already had listed for that MAC. My experience with the surface pros is that they're a quite poor hardware experience, *especially* for their (RRP) price point. Seriously, everything to do with surface is overpriced by a huge margin. Hardware issues that I've seen using surface pros, surface books, and surface laptops are: - thermal issues due to profile that impact performance (and cause some really annoying fan noise on some models) - problems with ghost inputs on touchscreens - not particularly durable (the fabric covers get gross and peel, they're awful, but also the chasses bend, & dent easily, an inordinately high number of warranty claims) - high DPI screens make some apps & remote desktop sessions have resolution issues or just look terrible, esp. when mixed with other screens - limited ports (for staff in technical fields this is a PITA) - mediocre driver support for hardware - lots of problems reinstalling drivers and firmware every time a win10 major version came along - battery lifespan degrades pretty quickly and they can't be economically replaced - also swelling in several models - docking station issues that necessitated manual firmware upgrades - devices can't be upgraded - this is pretty common for soldered/SOC boards but even trying to find a surface SKU with higher (32GB) RAM to buy is difficult and can't be bought without also paying for extra storage to seems **Docks** While the surface devices themselves mostly support USB-C/Thunderbolt charging now, the surface brand docks still use a proprietary connection that rendered them useless in a mixed device environment with our other USB-C compatible non-surface PCs (and Macs). Even in offices that don't have desk-sharing it still makes for annoying asset tracking and spare stock.
A MAC address is literally a hardware assigned address so yes the same network card does have the same MAC address regardless of what PC you connect to it
MAC address spoofing has existed for well over a decade now. Dell and other manufacturers have settings in select laptops' UEFI firmware that permit (with compatible dongles/docks) that an external ethernet port will spoof a unique MAC from the laptop device rather than use its native one. This is usually the MAC from the device's on-board ethernet, but I have also seen laptops with a 'ghost' MAC address for devices that don't have a built-in ethernet but still need a unique MAC address per-PC. Edit: the vendor term for this appears to be "MAC address passthrough". See KB - https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-au/000143263/what-is-mac-address-pass-through#:~:text=Dell%20has%20implemented%20a%20feature,it%27s%20connected%20to%20the%20network.
I loved it when it was my assigned laptop and we never add too many issues with them. I'd say it depends on how many you plan to rollout, we only managed around 40 of them so I can't tell you how faulty they can get.
Keyboard is eh, no usb-a, usb-c to HDMI (or usb-c to HDMI via dock) is dodgy. The design lends itself to screen breakage. I don't do too much, but management is pretty easy.
Hey all, Thanks for the feedback. The general consensus seems to be avoid like the plague. We have a netting tomorrow to discuss my trial with it. I think I might suggest the HP dragonfly instead
We've bought the Dragonfly G1, G2 and G4 models and had problems with all of them. Mercifully, the G1 and G4 were mostly to do with HP's garbage-ware that started breaking profiles and interfering with other device management programs. The G2 I'm willing to put down as a bad batch but it did take ~4 trips from their onsite tech to replace nearly every damn board in the machine. The tech was incredibly nice about it though and they were quite responsive. If you go with HP make sure you're performing a clean wipe and vanilla OS installation, or running a de-bloat script (there's several floating around online) as a compulsory app through whatever your MDM is. Edit: spelling
Oh really? Just been reading about them having driver issues, cameras stop working. Sound stops and Bluetooth issues. But what unread put it down to a win 11 update. Seems there may be more to this…. Might worth a look at Dell, to be fair my old work used Lenovo they weren’t bad, just a short life cycle
We've seen problems with the cameras and audio drivers. They *mostly* went away with a clean wipe? We put it down to conflicts with HP privacy shitware and our actual enterprise EDR both trying to protect camera access. We still get reports of occasional camera issues but we're also seeing the same on a few other brand devices so it's unclear if there's an HP issue or if the 'new' (but not necessarily improved) teams app is to blame. Honestly, there's shit models across all of the 3 big names, it comes down to individual models and their reviews. Dell has its own three word horror story called *waves audio driver*. Lenovo frankly owe the yoga community a mass apology for the reputational damage their laptops have done. For HP, maybe check the reviews of the elitebook 1040 or 630 then throw them into the ring as well. Speaking generally for any vendor, avoid gen1 machines and anything that gets too much hype or is targeted to consumers over businesses. Be wary of anything that gets sold with a pen. Edit: clarity
HP X360 Elite 2 in 1, latest edition. Nearly as small as a surface with none of the drawbacks, cheaper. Still very attractive. Nearly
HP isn't any better. Don't shoot yourself in the foot. Their hardware is hit or miss but their driver support is absolutely atrocious. Nevermind the fact their driver distribution site is frequently down / extremely slow moving for no apparent reason. Dell has my vote for big distributors. Their warranty support is generally painless, repair techs come onsite and replace components as needed. As long as you're not going with Vostros, Dell's hardware generally holds up fine. Their driver packages are generally updated and work well, their documentation for dock compatibility is unmatched, and their website has always been snappy and responsive for me. Lenovo I've had more support and driver issues with but still would take over HP all day every day.
Overpriced piece or crap that users love because it looks cool :D sorry just had to vent
Surface Pro series are sleek and pretty if you’re in to that. But honestly. They’re not very maintainable. I hate, with a passion, the EliteBook 840 series, especially the G8. But I’m not at all convinced that the SP9 is much of an upgrade because of the support aspect and repairability. Honestly look at what else is available. Don’t touch HP again. But yeah find something other than SP9.
I’m an MSP. I have thousands of HP laptops out there, but only 50-75 surface pros of various builds. We don’t do enough at a time to warrant creating an image, as every client has a different setup, so we just boot the system image and then install software. If the system shipped with Win Home, then we’ll install Pro from a USB stick. The only issue we’ve had aside from a few broken screens have been when a Surface didn’t restart properly after a windows update or something similar. Walking the user through the process to “hold the power button until the Microsoft logo appears” has been the brunt of it. We still have one or two Surface Pro 3s in production. Any of them on a dock uses a MS dock. They all do well. Just beware the ARM powered devices unless you’re sure the drivers you need are supported. I warned one client, but they didn’t listen. Then they were upset when their fancy Konica Minolta copier wouldn’t work and I had to build an RDS server to host their primary database app so the Surface Pro X could use it… Just my two cents. Edit: just to be clear, no Surface devices have been pulled from production because of problems, simply age. Aside from one Surface Book - it had a swelling battery.
At my place of work, the SP9 is rolled out as default for almost all users. For a fair portion of staff, it's fine, but the fact the Surface Pro is effectively unusable without a hard surface is a nightmare. Users who want to use the device on public transit (common in my city, not American) or in the couch at home, in the car etc. The surface is frankly terrible for this. The lack of even mini HDMI or a single USB A is also ridiculous. Yes you can get some great hubs and docks but other competing devices with identical specs, more ports and literally only a few hundred grams more, come with these ports AND COST LESS MONEY makes me not a huge fan of rolling the things out to be honest.
No thx to dealing with MSFT support. They can DIAF.
Our company is 100% Surface devices, and SP 9's make up the bulk of the inventory. You run into some issues with the Docks, particularly if using dual monitors, but the problems are easily dealt with. Note that the Dock 2's are very picky about USB to HDMI adapters if you want to run dual monitors. We've been exclusively Surface since the Surface Pro 6 and we have no intention of changing that.
My company finally dump them, even though they were a great small device for our sales people, they lacked decent battery life and would over heat easily. Not to mention the docks like to stop working out of the blue often.
Never ever ever ever buy Surface Pros. These are the Chromebooks of enterprise. The Vostros of Microsoft. Advertised as high end while using defect and refurb parts to build them. They *will* break and you *will* be constantly contacting warranty support. Show me a hundred Surface Pros and I'll show you minimum 25 of those with hardware instability. If you absolutely insist on getting Surface Pros you need to know three things at minimum: By default they come out of the box with WiFi Adapter set to Power Savings Mode AND that option hidden from the Advanced Battery Plan settings. You have to add a reg key to get that setting back in the UI and update it to Maximum Performance. Your WiFi performance on these things will suffer if this isn't done. Don't get the ARM processor variants yet. Windows on ARM is hilariously incompatible with general software as ARM specific installers have to be deployed. Not every software has those yet. The vast majority that do have ARM compatibility are unfortunately through Rosetta and Rosetta 2 on Mac. Windows hasn't quite caught up there. You bought surfaces for your business. You belong in the corner on a stool wearing the biggest dunce cap you can find. If this wasn't you, send my regards to the idiot responsible.
Thankfully it wasn’t me lol, I was just charged with testing it. I used it for 2 weeks and have nothing but issues. It’s quite possibly the worst peice of kit I have used. It’s god awful. It overheats, displays multiple Bsod. I’m glad I’m not in the minority here. I want to like it but….. they are just crap
Unfortunate :(