They’ve made a lot of good peripherals like keyboards, mice, joysticks. Xbox one used to support Kinect and TV timers which was nice.
The surface line has been interesting, and I’d be tempted to buy one if they didn’t come with Windows 11 (I need to look up if you can install Win 10 on the newer ones).
They came out with some wild stuff during the Sidekick phone days like Microsoft Kin and Zune. But honestly current management doesn’t seem to be interested in anything but boring but profitable software services (like Xbox game pass) that they can charge a subscription for.
As someone who has dealt with a couple dozen Surface devices in a corporate setting, I cannot recommend them. They’re fine when they work. When they have issues though, they are practically impossible to repair. Keyboard port issues, dock connection issues, bricked devices, and even expanding batteries are all issues I’ve run into. When you have an issue, Microsoft will just swap it out for a different one rather than fix the device.
At an old company I joined they had rolled them out to all employees. Six months before me getting onboard they had already given up, but we still had to support the ones out in the field. Fun fact about Surfaces, despite it being MS hardware running an MS operating system, the Windows 10 and 11 base system does not have drivers for the keyboard or mouse. You have to use a special image for the Surface devices. That meant maintaining two custom WIM images for deployment and keeping them in sync. We scrapped the remaining Surfaces and gave people the choice of Macs or ThinkPads instead. You can guess which was more popular among the office folk.
The surface coffee table was a pretty interesting piece of hardware. Besides that, whole lot of rectangular cases?
They’ve made a lot of good peripherals like keyboards, mice, joysticks. Xbox one used to support Kinect and TV timers which was nice.
The surface line has been interesting, and I’d be tempted to buy one if they didn’t come with Windows 11 (I need to look up if you can install Win 10 on the newer ones).
They came out with some wild stuff during the Sidekick phone days like Microsoft Kin and Zune. But honestly current management doesn’t seem to be interested in anything but boring but profitable software services (like Xbox game pass) that they can charge a subscription for.
That’s totally true. I was trying to remember hardware releases but didn’t go back far enough.
I used the intellimouse forever.
Kinect was innovative.
I wasn’t personally a big fan of the zune. I used one for a month and immediately went back to my iPod. But I can see why people liked them.
As someone who has dealt with a couple dozen Surface devices in a corporate setting, I cannot recommend them. They’re fine when they work. When they have issues though, they are practically impossible to repair. Keyboard port issues, dock connection issues, bricked devices, and even expanding batteries are all issues I’ve run into. When you have an issue, Microsoft will just swap it out for a different one rather than fix the device.
At an old company I joined they had rolled them out to all employees. Six months before me getting onboard they had already given up, but we still had to support the ones out in the field. Fun fact about Surfaces, despite it being MS hardware running an MS operating system, the Windows 10 and 11 base system does not have drivers for the keyboard or mouse. You have to use a special image for the Surface devices. That meant maintaining two custom WIM images for deployment and keeping them in sync. We scrapped the remaining Surfaces and gave people the choice of Macs or ThinkPads instead. You can guess which was more popular among the office folk.
Why did they delete their comments?