Six months on: Microsoft Surface Pro 3 revisited

Every Windows user knows that one of the biggest banes of their existence is the patch. With computer software — any software, no one is exempt — comes bugs and holes, and with bugs and holes comes patches, as the company that creates the software tries to fix any issues that might pop up. Generally, as one patch fixes a bunch of bugs or holes, it introduces another set, and the logic continues that you’ll be getting patches until you decide to never use a computer again.

It is what it is, and nothing is ever perfect.

But Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 might have received the worst sort of patches we’ve seen, with the skill to dent your productivity and just leave you with hours of frustration.

We’re not quite sure what patch brought it in, but at one point several months ago, the touchscreen stopped working properly.

You would swipe up to unlock the computer and while you would be swiping from bottom to top, the unlock would only go half way. So you’d try again, and again, and again, and that screen that you would try to get to — the one where you type in your password or PIN — would never show, because the image screen you’re supposed to swipe up at just wouldn’t get out of its way.

We eventually found we could touch the keyboard instead or use the included Surface stylus to make the system do what we want, but we shouldn’t have to, and the touchscreen should just work, like on day one, and day two, and on day 120, even though it wasn’t working as well here as it should have been.

The touchscreen failures would continue, though, and your fingers would lose connectivity for the Windows 8 swiping gestures, refusing to pull up the charms or letting you jump quickly between apps. Again, the Microsoft stylus would often save us, but if you don’t want to use the pen all the time, you shouldn’t have to, and we started to wonder what was causing this.

Was the touchscreen losing calibration, was the hardware failing, or was it something else altogether?

We tried the first one, recalibrating several times over the course of a week, and found that this wasn’t making much of a dent. We considered the hardware, but doubted it based on what we were experiencing, bringing the likely culprit to something else altogether.

Some of the screen’s drivers would actually appear to stop working properly as we were touching the screen, and we could see proof of this as we were using the Surface, evident from the soft circle seen in the above screenshot.

That’s our finger touching the screen, and to make matters worse, we could reposition the touch mark or remove it easily. Swiping it out of position wouldn’t always work, and often it would stay on the screen as we worked using the mouse.

Eventually it would go, and our fingers could go back to work, but this issue told us there was a driver failing, likely from a patch that had been rolled out over time.

As we’ve mentioned before, the pen would usually get us through this, and if not the pen, the touchpad mouse, but these should not be happening, and one of the world’s best productivity devices should have better patches than what we were seeing.

Beyond the software bugs, six months on, we’ve found that the keyboard can be a little frustrating.

While we still love how thin it is, and how it still provides just enough travel to get work done, we’re not impressed that it needs to be replaced about a couple hundred thousand words in.

You might say “if you’re writing that much on your computer, you deserve to replace the keyboard”, but the serious side of this is most laptops can take a lot more than what the Microsoft TypeCover can, and if you’re a writer and the Surface Pro 3 is your dedicated machine, you’ll need to replace it after a good four or five months of writing.

How do we know?

At around 10,000 words away from one of this writer’s books being completed (none published yet), the “R” key started playing up, and when we say “playing up” we actually mean “stopped working”.

Words that used that letter would miss it most of the time, unless we double-typed the letter or struck the key remarkably hard.

It was frustrating, that much we could tell you, and we encountered a similar problem with the Surface Pro 2 last year, but stopped using that computer for writing the moment it popped up. This time, we kept on with it, and found the problem persisted until the keyboard was replaced.

Now with a new keyboard, the “R” key — and every other key for that matter — is running perfectly, but that brings us to one specific point: the keyboard for the Surface Pro 3 is optional and extra, with a price tag of around $150. For that sort of money, the keyboard should last longer, especially since most laptop keyboards will.

Granted, the Surface Pro 3 isn’t a dedicated laptop, but the very fact that it is pushed like a laptop replacement — basically a tablet that can do it all and then some — should mean the keyboard would handle excessive typing better than what we’re currently seeing.

We’re still using the Surface Pro 3, that said, and it is one of our favourite machines to use. In fact, in the past week since we started writing this piece, the touchscreen has started to become more responsive, almost back to the days when we first started using it.

Perhaps a new patch has been rolled out that addresses our concerns. We sure hope so, and maybe six months on, Microsoft’s team of programmers are beginning to work out how to restore this excellent machine to greatness.

But these sorts of bugs should be more rigorously tested, ironed out, and barely visible, and we know we’re not the only ones crying out for patches and updates that work, and for a keyboard that survives longer, because it’s this sort of experience that could cause Microsoft to lose customers to other computer manufacturers long term.

Ultimately, when the Surface Pro 4 rolls around — we’re guessing October for Windows 10 — Microsoft really needs to nail some of these kinks, because while we still love the Surface and what it means for our productivity, the frustration some of these issues create could make a Surface owner think of switching when they rear their ugly head.