Microsoft’s Surface Book & Surface Pro 4 receives a much needed fix

Microsoft‘s much anticipated new Surface products, the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, launched to a myriad of complaints from users who were receiving a less than satisfactory experience with it. Many, ourselves included, felt that Microsoft shipped an unfinished product. From what we gathered, it isn’t the hardware that the Surface users are unhappy about, rather it was the software implementation that let the devices down.

What’s worse, Microsoft’s “solution” to the problem was an apology on their forums which only served to irk more users. Now though, they seem to have actually come up with a solution to at least one of their problems.

Besides the issues with the device’s power drainage during sleep and random reboots, one other nagging issue was the Surface device’s keyboard and touchpad. The much improved Surface Pro 4 Type Cover keyboard was so advanced, it seemed, that it didn’t deem the Surface Pro 4 a worthy device and thus refused to pair with it properly. The Surface Pro 4 had issues connecting with its keyboard, especially when removing the Type Cover and reattaching it, bugging out the mouse cursors and other modes for Continuum.

For us, the problems were more rudimentary when it came to the Surface Pro 4. We found out that if the keyboard was attached when the device was off, it wouldn’t detect the keyboard when we switched it on, forcing us to disengage and reattach the keyboard to the device.

This update also affects Surface Book users, where apparently the device had problems with its touchpad and keyboard as well. Here are the System hardware update: 12/17/15 changelogs:

Surface Book

• Surface Base Firmware Update (v1.1.421.0) improves touchpad and keyboard experience.

 

Surface Pro 4

• Surface Pro 4 Firmware Update (v1.1.420.0) enhances stability with Surface Pro 4 Type Cover.

If you were anywhere near as excited as us for the launch of the Surface Pro 4, and dropped a considerable chunk of your savings to get one with the Type Cover keyboard, I’m sure you were equally crestfallen when you discovered that Microsoft already knew the device had issues yet still decided to put it in the market.

While doing something like this is, frankly, unforgivable, you’d think that a company as big as Microsoft would have some kind of fix ready almost immediately after it put an unfinished product on sale. Instead, they said that major fixes would only be coming next year.

In any case, these problems seem to be software based, and fixable via updates so if you’ve bought a Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book device, our advice is to hunker down and weather this initial storm in the hopes that your device will eventually live up to its full potential.

If you’re still on the fence about purchasing one, stay tuned to our upcoming review of the Surface Pro 4 where we will be taking a close look at the device, all of its problems, fixes and more.

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