Microsoft makes headlines after Consumer Reports pulled recommendation ratings for the company’s Surface Laptops and Tablets. Surveys return poor ratings on product reliability.
Surface Laptops and Tablets loses recommendation
Microsoft surface laptops and tablets are no longer “recommended” by Consumer Reports. The “recommended” designation was removed from four Microsoft laptops. According to 9 to 5 Mac, the rating service would no longer recommend such products due to relatively poor reliability marks compared to other brands. The rating service found out that by the end of the second year of use, 25% of users experience several problems with their gadgets.
The Microsoft products that were stripped with the rating service’s brand of recommendation includes the 128 GB and 512 GB versions of the Microsoft Surface Book as well as the 128GB and 256GB versions of the Microsoft Surface Laptop. Since the company is a relative beginner in the hardware business. The rating service had no data to work on during the company’s first year. But to date, sufficient user feedbacks were collated, and the CR was able to come up with an estimate of the predicted reliability of Microsoft Surface laptops.
Consumer Reports judge reliability via surveys. The latest study of the Consumer Reports National Research Center revealed that 25% of the users experience problems with surface laptops within two years from the date of purchase.
Microsoft’s figure exceeded the average rating of other brands. The disparity was statistically significant, and Microsoft falls short of the CR’s standard.
Microsoft defends product reliability
Microsoft disagrees with the findings of Consumer Reports. According to ZDNet, Microsoft believes that the results of the rating service are not reflective of the actual reliability of the surface laptops.
Microsoft claims that actual real-life numbers of surface laptop breakage is significantly lower.
The company also mentioned that many of its products have performed well in several trails conducted in the laboratories. In fact, the new Microsoft Surface Pro earned a Very Good mark in several CR tests. Based on the device’s lab performance, Surface Pro has been highly rated. To come up with a rating for Microsoft’s surface laptops and tablet, the CR gathered data from 90,741 tablets and laptops that were bought between 2014 and early 2017.
