I was recently provided a Microsoft Surface laptop for work and it’s my first real experience using this product. I must say, the laptop itself is proving to be quite a workhorse. I have 32GB of RAM on it and with everything that I’ve thrown at it (virtualization, coding, tabbed-browser mania, etc), it continues to chug along quite nicely.
A nice laptop from Microsoft you say?? Do I go out right now and buy one?
It’s still early, but there is only one aspect of this system that makes me hesitant to recommend it to folks. The proprietary docking station. I cannot throw enough vitriol at this one design decision that ruins a pretty nice product. In a world that has gone USB-C, this proprietary connector to the docking station just ruins the whole thing.
On top of this, the problems I’ve encountered with this docking station are endless. I’m not sure if the issue is special to me or if this is something that keeps people from mass-adopting this product (the jury is still out). But because of this docking station, sadly, I cannot recommend what is otherwise, a pretty nice system.
I have to eat a little bit of crow on this post. It turns out there is a USB-A and USB-C port on the left side of the Surface laptop (not sure why it took me so long to realize this). I’m able to utilize the USB ports to hook up USB-C docks to this laptop. I can now officially recommend Surface as a good laptop to folks.