I've used surfaces of various kinds for more than 10 years. Overall they've been significantly less troublesome than the laptops from other major brands I've had over the same period. I put this down to the dogfood eating nature of the Surface. Whoever is responsible for the sound interface driver in a Dell laptop is unlikely to be a user of that laptop and even less likely to have the capability to get Dell to ship a fixed version. Microsoft however I suspect uses Surfacen extensively in house. In this respect it makes the Surface products more akin to Apple computers. The same is probably true for high end Chromebooks. I never used a dock, fwiw.
A couple anecdotes from me:
A (quite large) company that I worked for stopped offering surfaces to employees after the average lifetime over the 3 years they offered them was under 1 year. We even had a terrible batch of Dells at the same time that still handily outlived the surfaces.
Small sample size (N=3) but, nobody I know that works at Microsoft uses a surface or any other Microsoft branded laptop.
I have never used any of the Surface products but I do remember how people liked the almost no questions asked replacement policy for them at the Microsoft stores. I knew a guy that worked there and he said it was an all day occurrence.
> Whoever is responsible for the sound interface driver in a Dell laptop is unlikely to be a user of that laptop and even less likely to have the capability to get Dell to ship a fixed version
Oh boy, don't get me started on Dell haha. Sure, they've got a better service model (people come to you), but at least in my experience they contract with service people who service multiple brands who can't help but shit-talk Dell. Not very confidence inspiring, particularly when the cause of the issue ends up being a connector not being fully plugged in from the factory.
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