An Ode to the Surface Book - The Greatest Terrible Laptop Ever

 

There was a period when the Surface line felt like Microsoft was actively trying to rethink what a portable computer could look like, sometimes with the sort of results that made you wonder if they actually tested the damn things before shipping them. That ambition seems much harder to find in the Surface lineup now - especially in the form of something like the Surface Book.

The Surface brand for some time, felt like a major disruptor in the modern consumer PC market. 

Microsoft clearly had their sights set on Apple, who at the time had garnered some well deserved infamy for hyping up the ultimately underwhelming early generations of the iPad Pro as a genuine laptop replacement, and also from the questionably designed 12-inch MacBook and later touch bar MacBook Pro. 

Microsoft in turn marketed a line of premium devices that boasted radical features like detachable keyboards, kickstands, and stylus support on top of being a full-fledged Windows PC. Hell, they continued to offer the USB-A port which - flash forward to 2026 - are still pretty damn prevalent! 

Apple did not have a single device like a Surface, and Microsoft clearly wanted them to know it.

Except it didn't always work right. In fact, almost none of them did.

Historically, the Mac ecosystem's biggest upside is how well integrated the systems are from the hardware through the software. Sure, at the time you had a terrible keyboard and no ports, but the basic experience offered by Apple's years of refinement still felt very coherent. 

That lack of cohesion was often painfully prevalent with Surface. 

Windows was, and still is a hot mess. It works with absolutely everything, but it's bloated and feels like it's held together with duct tape. 

Coupling it with radically designed hardware was just begging for trouble. Rampant software bugs, thermal problems, and terrible battery life were just some of the issues befalling Surface users, on top of the devices themselves just being a little... weird.

But, people who could live with the faults were rewarded with a device that could do basically everything that an iPad and MacBook could only accomplish separately, and more.

Old faithful, circa 2016.

I had a Surface Pro 3 that got me through my first two years of engineering college, and it was exactly all of the above. 

It could churn through handwritten notes, CAD, and some light gaming without much complaint. Its light weight and small form factor was also instrumental in me going totally paperless, telling the overpriced textbook publishers to go pound sand. 

Yet, it sucked down battery life like a vampire and it constantly thermal throttled. In fact, the body would regularly get nuclear hot, and the fan ripped like a jet engine just from watching YouTube. It got so bad that I had to restrict the CPU power just to keep it tolerable.

Even then, I still loved it. The Pro 3 annoyed me constantly, but it also replaced notebooks, textbooks, a drawing tablet and a conventional laptop often enough that I was willing to forgive it.

Then Microsoft built something even more radical.

Enter the Surface Book. 

It was almost everything I liked about the Pro 3 cranked up to eleven, and then some. 

Microsoft designed the Book with the more comfortable form factor of a traditional laptop but with the ability to seamlessly switch to tablet mode via a detachable hinge. You could use the device on it's own like a standard tablet in "clipboard" mode, or you could socket it back into the base for a stand, and to leverage additional graphics power from the discrete GPU.

Over my few years using the 13.5-inch performance model, I've found it ran less hot, less often than the Pro 3 when doing more CPU and graphics intensive work and though the fans got nearly just as loud when you really start pushing the machine, the increased performance handily made up for it.

The hinge doesn't offer nearly the same level of sturdiness as the Pro 3's kickstand when tilting it back for writing but when folded down, it's at a comfortable enough angle. It's also over twice as thick as the Pro 3 with the type cover attached, so it took up a fair bit more bag real estate as well.

Yet the versatility is just unrivaled.  

I could switch from handwriting and drawing to programming and CAD work at the push of a button and the flip of the screen, and it's not at all compromising feeling. Unlike the Pro 3, the keyboard and trackpad actually feel like something you'd expect on a premium laptop, with decent key travel and a nice slick glass surface to move your cursor about. 

Clipboard mode felt a little more gimmicky, but I've found that it makes for a handy presentation aid since it cuts the device's weight down significantly, and it help with the handling during the extremely rare occasions I needed the rear camera.

All this versatility made the Book feel like it could be the king of all laptops. But what it actually was crowned is a whole lot less flattering - the king of headaches.

I've had so many damn problems with the Surface Book. 

Like, I've never owned a device that even comes close to just how frustratingly temperamental this computer is. And here's the kicker: I technically went through FOUR Books. 

I've sent three Book 1s back for RMAs and I was last on a performance model Book 2 that Microsoft upgraded me to because they literally couldn't get the previous attempts right - and even it had it's own share of faults. 

Let's start from the top, from least to most obnoxious:

1. The Display

The display on the 13.5-inch Book is an LCD with a somewhat weird 3:2 aspect ratio at 3000 x 2000. 

It looked very nice for all intents and purposes. The colors are vibrant, contrast is good, and text is very easy to read on it. I personally like turning the resolution scale back to 175% just to give things a bit more real estate, but even at the factory 200% setting it doesn't feel too crowded on the desktop. 

That said, Surface Books have this long running issue of the top line of pixels on the display flickering when the screen is idle (ie. the cursor isn't being moved). 

This was a problem on the Book 1, and it was still a problem on the Book 2, though I am not sure about the Book 3. Given how many times this issue has been brought up, it's genuinely nuts Microsoft never fixed it. Sure, it's a really minor issue and it doesn't effect the device's functionality, but it's hard not to notice it.

Evidently the root cause is Intel Integrated Graphics' panel self-refresh setting. 

This feature is supposed to improve power efficiency, but since the drivers for the iGPU were specifically compiled for the Surface Book, you cannot disable it without uninstalling the Microsoft specific graphics driver for the chipset and installing the device agnostic one from Intel's site. Only then will the option to disable panel self-refresh will appear in Intel Graphics Command Center. 

I really didn't notice any detrimental effect to the battery life after this fix, but it's annoying that such hoops have to be jumped through to on even brand-new computers, plus it often breaks after Windows updates - which rather inconveniently have their own say on whether or not you can just ignore them. 

2. Hinge and Body

The Book is a very striking device. It's made entirely out of magnesium and it features this wild looking segmented hinge. 

Now, I'm not a huge fan of metal bodied devices from a general durability standpoint as they tend to look like absolute dinged-up shit if they aren't completely babied, but the decision to use magnesium in the Book's construction is a bit perplexing to me. Magnesium is lighter than aluminum and easier to cast complex shapes with, but it's a softer metal that is more prone to warping - especially in increasingly thin designs such as a laptop or tablet.

My very first Book was so badly warped that the lid wouldn't stay shut even with the magnets. 

I don't know what directly caused this, but I can only assume it being tossed in a backpack with the occasional heavy textbook didn't do it too well over the years, and that's even with a protective sleeve. The hinge also gives the Book a roughly one-centimeter gap at it's widest point when the device is closed, so the display is never fully supported even when the device is closed.

3. Detach Fails

The detach fails to work A LOT. 

Often times I'd pull the computer out of hibernation and attempt to flip it around for note taking, only to find that stupid "Detach Failed" error pop up in the bottom right of the screen. I had to restart the computer in order for the locks to disengage and even after moving up a generation, the same problem still occurred.

Only recently did I learn that it was fixable, and by that point I had long since stopped regularly needing to use it in tablet mode. Separate the base, fully charge it by itself, reattach it to the display, and like magic - it started working again. Consistently at that.

Why? I have absolutely no fucking idea.

My best guess is that the base battery had fallen into some state where the system wasn't supplying the
detach mechanism properly, and independently charging it dragged everything back into agreement. 

Whatever the actual explanation, this is the purest Surface Book repair imaginable: the hardware is perfectly capable of working, Windows insists that it cannot, and the solution involves performing a ritual nobody would ever reasonably think to try. 

4. OS Rot

Like I said earlier, Windows is a hot mess. Specifically, Windows 10.

I don't even mean that in the usual “Windows has too much crap installed” sense. Over the years I owned
these machines, I found that the Surface Book would gradually accumulate little software problems until the computer simply didn't behave as cleanly as it had after a fresh installation.

Sleep would become unreliable. Drivers would misbehave after updates. Detaching the screen would become temperamental. Graphics switching could get weird. Battery drain would suddenly become worse for reasons that weren't immediately obvious. An update would fix one thing and then seemingly resurrect some other problem I'd forgotten about six months earlier.

Every once in a while I'd finally get tired of troubleshooting it, wipe the machine, install Windows fresh, and suddenly it would feel wonderful again.

For a while.

That's what I mean by OS rot. The hardware never changed, yet after enough time and enough Windows
updates the machine would accumulate enough little inconsistencies that I stopped trusting whether a new
problem was hardware failure, driver failure, Windows being Windows, or some magnificent combination of all three.

On a normal laptop, that's annoying.

On something like the Surface Book, where basic functions such as attaching half of the computer to the
other half depend on firmware, drivers and Windows all cooperating perfectly, it's a recipe for insanity.

5. Hibernation (or lack of it)

Something many Windows users are probably accustomed to is the fact that sleep mode flat out doesn't work. There are so many random wake timers that even when a PC is explicitly told to sleep, it will more than likely power up again after some time for some inexplicable reason. 

On a desktop, it's an annoyance. On a laptop, it's you potentially losing your ass before a big presentation or exam because the computer was dead the second you pulled it out of your bag.

That was certainly the case with my Book. When the lid was shut and it was put in it's sleeve, it would just fire up again and roast itself doing god knows what, only for me to take it out maybe hours later, scalding hot and with a nearly dead battery. 

Eventually I stopped trusting sleep entirely. If I actually needed the Book to have a predictable amount of battery when I pulled it out later, I either shut the computer completely down or forced it to use proper hibernation by increasing the size of hiberfil.sys through the command prompt.

That's ridiculous for a premium portable computer.

One of the fundamental advantages a laptop is supposed to have is that I can close the lid, put it in my bag,
and reasonably expect it to remain dormant until I need it again. Microsoft somehow turned that into gambling.

Will it still have 70 percent battery?

Will it be dead?

Will it be warm?

Will I unzip the sleeve and discover I've been carrying a small convection oven around campus for the past hour?

Spin the fucking wheel. 

6. The Battery

After some time with my first machine, the computer developed a problem that was far more concerning than just an occasionally obnoxious detachable display or a sleep mode that doesn't work: the base battery started swelling to the point that the computer wouldn't even sit flat on a desk anymore. 

That is a genuinely dangerous problem for any device to have - let alone one this expensive. 

The only batteries I've ever experienced swelling up like this are cheap Amazon smartphone batteries (back when replacing your phone's battery was a thing) that would do so within a few months of use. It's not something you'd expect on a $2000-plus laptop that's barely over three years old. 

I have devices with Li-ion batteries that are well over a decade old which such as my various iPods, PSP, and even my iBook G3 which - sure, don't hold much of a charge, but they sure as shit aren't ballooning up like this thing is, even after considerable charge cycles are under their belt.

I get that lithium-ion batteries are consumable components. Every lithium battery will eventually lose capacity, and any one of them can potentially fail. What I don't accept is designing that consumable component into a machine in such a way that replacing it requires dismantling a glued magnesium chassis, then acting surprised when customers get angry after the battery balloons up inside a $2,000 computer.

Worse, swelling here isn't merely an inconvenience. The expanding battery can physically push the display away from the chassis, and a damaged lithium pouch cell is a legitimate safety problem. 

That's when poor repairability stops being an enthusiast complaint. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't really care no matter how you explain that to them, as I am about to demonstrate.

7. Microsoft Support

Microsoft's support team initially did everything it could to avoid taking responsibility for the battery swelling problem. 

Now, I fully understand that this is the customer service representative's job: to avoid having to give an inch on behalf of the company, but my initial rep's response that "failures are not necessarily defects" is such an asinine and borderline insulting response that I almost went full Nicky Santoro on the guy.

That a swollen battery in a device that has absolutely zero mechanism for user replacement is considered acceptable enough to hold a customer hostage to $600 otherwise they're stuck with a legitimate fire hazard, isn't just scummy - it's dangerous. 

And frankly, there is ZERO guarantee that your $600 will actually get you a perfect replacement device. After I got through to a supervisor who was willing to replace the device free of charge, I proceeded with the RMA process, and got this back in return:

It's a little hard to tell in the photo, but the display was protruding out of this replacement Book 1 by a few millimeters - just enough to get a fingernail under it. 

 

This was unacceptable, and it told me two things. Firstly, this Book was probably experiencing minor battery swelling in the display half of the device and secondly, that Microsoft has absolutely no quality control when it comes to refurbished devices. 

 

In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't even refurbish these devices in the slightest. They just pull the "refurbs" out of an existing pile of returns and send them on their way.

Case in point, I present to you exhibit two:

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

The SECOND computer they sent me had the exact same issue, except it was even worse. Could you imagine paying Microsoft $600 - and they send you this shit in return? 

 

Honestly at this point I was just downright pissed. Screwing it up once? Okay, fine. But twice? Good fucking god. I needed this computer back before classes started and Microsoft continuing to send me lemon after lemon was getting ridiculous. 

 

By the time Microsoft finally upgraded me to the Book 2, my confidence in its refurbishment pipeline was gone. The machine could have arrived levitating six inches above the box and curing disease - and I still would've inspected the display seam for battery swelling first. 

 

Fortunately, everything seemed fine with the new computer... up until the base battery quit holding a meaningful charge a few months after I started using it.

By this point, the replacement device was already out of the limited warranty period and even then, I had zero faith Microsoft support would actually get it right. This is the type of experience spending over $2000 will get you with Microsoft. 

 

They will only care as much as it benefits them - and them caring is honestly almost as bad as if they didn't. 

8. Repairability (or lack of it)

After the RMA saga, I decided to take matters into my own hands. 

The battery problem exposes a bigger issue with the Surface Book, and one that extends to an unfortunate number of modern devices: absolute dogshit repairability. iFixit gave the Surface Book a 1 for basically being a total nightmare to disassemble. The entire device is glued together and nothing except for the SSD is interchangeable with standard aftermarket components... assuming you don't shatter the display trying to get to it.

No wonder I kept getting back horribly conditioned RMA devices. Microsoft designed a computer that's so difficult to repair, it's not even worth it to themselves to do it for the customer. It's basically smartphone engineering, just bigger. If anything important on this computer breaks, it's effectively a big slab of e-waste and you just have to buy another one. 

Great for Microsoft. Very, very bad for the consumer.

In my case, I took it upon myself to tear into the Book 2's base to replace it's flat battery. If this thing was designed with even a shred of integrity, it would just be a few screws and be done. Instead, it took me an iOpener, several guitar picks, and a double-edged razor blade to rip through the insanely strong adhesive holding the bottom plate on. The battery is also held on with monster adhesive and removing it is an exercise in not accidentally puncturing it as you work it off the bottom plate.

And naturally, because the bottom plate is magnesium, it got a little damaged in the process. Great.

Conclusion

At this point you're probably wondering why the hell I kept putting up with any of this.

And I get it. You're probably thinking I'm idiot for subjecting myself to this nonsense for so long. Sure, I would've jumped ship ages ago if there were any equally capable alternative already out there - but there simply wasn't. 

Because when the Surface Book worked, it was in a league of its own. That's the maddening part. 

I could carry one computer to class, write directly on lecture slides, detach the screen for a presentation, flip it around into a drawing surface, compile code, work in CAD and then dock it at home like a conventional laptop. I didn't need a MacBook plus an iPad plus a drawing tablet. The Book could impersonate all three just well enough that I didn't need any of them - reliability be damned.

Plenty of products are frustrating because they're bad. The Surface Book was frustrating because it was almost brilliant.

Every time I got sufficiently angry to start shopping for a replacement, I would eventually ask what could
actually replace everything it did, and ended up staring at the same stupid magnesium laptop again. 

That is how Microsoft got four Surface Books out of me, and to this day it remains one of the most versatile and interesting computers I've ever owned - and simultaneously one of the least trustworthy because of everything required to make that versatility work.

Two batteries. An electrically locking detachable hinge. Separate graphics hardware in the keyboard base. Custom firmware. Custom display drivers. Windows power management. A glued-together magnesium chassis that turned routine battery replacement into a repair project. Microsoft made an extraordinarily complicated computer and then seemingly gave itself no margin for anything to go wrong.

And shit went wrong. Frequently.

By the end, I didn't sell my Surface Book 2 because I had finally found some obviously superior replacement. I sold it because my life had changed enough that I no longer needed its unique bag of tricks badly enough to tolerate the headaches attached to them.

Apparently Microsoft shared similar feelings and instead of continuing to refine the concept, they replaced the Book 3 with the more reliable, scalable - and much less ambitious Surface Laptop Studio.

 

This was a device that didn't really satisfy anyone. The performance of the SLS was underwhelming for the premium carded for it, Microsoft axed useful ports in favor of USB-C in a very "courageous" move, and it's pull forward display design was too functionally constrained for it to really feel like a true Surface Book successor.

Microsoft couldn't have timed it any worse either, because mere weeks after the release of the Surface Laptop Studio; Apple announced the revised M1 MacBook Pro. 

These new Mac laptops brought back MagSafe, HDMI, and an SD card reader - the kind of ports Microsoft largely just eliminated on the SLS - alongside a faster and more power efficient ARM architecture which would soon prove to be far more consequential to the future of the industry than the hokey 2-in-1 design could ever muster.

After just one much needed hardware revision that added ports back and improved performance in the form of the Surface Laptop Studio 2, Microsoft unceremoniously put the design out to pasture less than four years after it was introduced. Nothing from Microsoft with a similar convertible form factor has followed it since.

And that's probably the saddest part. I don't want Microsoft to stop making weird computers. I want Microsoft to make weird computers well enough that owning one doesn't feel like an endurance
test - but Microsoft apparently decided it's not worth the effort anymore.

If the answer to those failures is simply to retreat into increasingly conventional hardware while pouring the company's attention into subscriptions, cloud services and whatever currently has “AI” printed on the box, then we've lost the part of Surface that made the brand worthwhile in the first place.

The Surface Book deserved refinement.

What it got was abandonment.

And considering how many times mine tried to cook itself inside my backpack, perhaps the feeling was
mutual.