If Microsoft was serious about enhancing the real and perceived quality of the brand they are establishing with the Surface Pro line (which seems to be very nice based on the my mother's earlier generation model), they should have tested Skylake, and it in the Surface Pro 4 prototypes, detected the problem, and delayed the launch. Intel's problem became their's when they shipped it in their hardware.
What's interesting about this is that it appears they did! Very very early SB models exist and tested MUCH better than the first run of production hardware. You can find a lot of early reviews that praise the battery life, etc.
Then the first wave of consumer-facing SBs went out and it was a total disaster. This might be something that Microsoft can fix, because they have dramatically improved the product experience and been very receptive to trading defective hardware. Mine was traded up the instant they looked at it, with apologies and a customer care call.
> they should have tested Skylake, and it in the Surface Pro 4 prototypes, detected the problem, and delayed the launch. Intel's problem became their's when they shipped it in their hardware.
Did you say the same thing when Apple shipped a massive defect rate on their first gen retina macbooks? Because they DID test thouse, and they still ended up shipping a truly phenomenal number of lemon screens with huge defect and failure rates.
Oh, and Apple refused to replace all but the most egregious failures. I still have a machine with such significant ghosting that it can be difficult to use. Ironically, DaringFireball is actually unreadable. I keep this machine around because it was part of a very special segment of my life, but also because I like showing people, "Yes even Apple's legendary hardware is rife with first gen bugs, and your iPhones and hypothetical new macbooks are no different."
Well as an engineer, I think we all know that manufacturing defects can creep in even after prototypes pass.
It's also the case that it's incredibly hard to test things like battery life, wifi connectivity and the effects of heavy processor workloads in a systematic way. You hope that your vendors do a good job (and I bet Microsoft's contract with Intel involves penalties for these major defects to try and incentivize Intel to handle these).
Look at the first Iphone4. How did they miss something as simple as skin contact causing significant antenna interference? Most of us hit it immediately. The answer: hardware in the real world is really hard.
Just a little bit of trivia which I found interesting -- Apple actually did not miss the antenna interference problem. They knew that it was an issue, but I guess they figured it was an acceptable tradeoff for the design they wanted.
I suspect if they knew how badly it hurt my reception (I totally lost signal and it took a long time to get back), they would be less surprised at the reaction.
That's not what I'd call a bug that "crept in". Surface Book I bought crashed unprovoked _several times a day_. That's deliberately shipping a completely faulty product that any self-respecting customer will take right back to the store. Which I did.
