Microsoft apologises over Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 flaws

Microsoft's Surface
There have been no shortage of problems with Microsoft's new Surface devices

You can't have missed the fact that the new Surface devices have been cursed by multiple problems, and neither of course has Microsoft – with the company now going as far as to issue an apology for the problems caused to early adopters.

This isn't really that surprising, given the weight of the feedback and moans which have appeared online – and the sheer number of niggles, many minor but some major – but it's still good to see that Microsoft can acknowledge the issues and say sorry.

Paul Thurrott spotted Redmond's apology, which was posted on the answers.microsoft.com forum, where much of the complaining from users has taken place (naturally enough).

A post from the Microsoft Surface Team thanked users for their "candid feedback" on the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, and underlined the fact that Redmond is listening – a theme the company has been trying to develop since the beta testing of Windows 10, and emphasis on user feedback in tweaking the OS.

The post read: "For those of you who've had a less-than-perfect experience [with the new Surface models], we're sorry for any frustration this has caused. Please know that we're reading your comments and hearing you loud and clear. Your input is incredibly valuable in helping us address your questions with timely updates and fixes."

More updates coming

The team also mentioned that they have aggressively pursued solutions for the most pressing issues, and a number of updates have been made, as we've seen.

Although the number of updates fired out in a short timeframe post-launch has also been something that has been criticised, as a flurry of early firmware updates isn't exactly good practice – particularly when one of the updates happened to break stuff (like Windows Hello) as well as fixing it.

At any rate, the team says that more fixes are on the way "to further improve the overall Surface experience", and hopefully these ones will be well tested. Of course, in an ideal world, much of this testing and patching should have been done before the devices were even launched.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).