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As a counter point, I love my Surface Laptop 3 as my personal device.

I had a pre-M1 MacBook Air for when I'm not working and I hated its fans constantly whirring and the industrial design that hadn't been updated in years.

I dived deep into different Windows laptops having spent 10+ years away and been really pleased with the purchase. The design is very simple, aspect ratio great, and the keyboard better than the Mac I was transitioning from.

I didn't like the Dell XPS's keyboard or display, and I tried the Razer Blade Stealth 13 but it was overkill.

Having not really used Windows for years and given that lots of Windows laptops still had shockingly cheap industrial design or weird quirks (webcam at the bottom?!), the Surface Laptop 3 was unfussy and a delight to use.

> or weird quirks (webcam at the bottom?!),

whoa!! what? i can't believe that someone did that, but then, yes I can. i guess that's useful if you have to look at the keyboard while typing. in that case, the bottom based cam is just a glance up???

Dell XPS has (or had, not checked) the covid-test-webcam.

Fortunately, the new XPS put the camera back in the correct spot. It’s got a good display, but hate the ratio.

That's so true! A third of the view it gets is the underside of your face and nose and the rest is the ceiling.

I have this XPS and use an external webcam when I need one.

Lenovo Legion Y540 also did this. I was using that laptop last spring when we switched to WFH... didn't last long! Ended up moving to my desktop and using a dedicated webcam before long.

Fortunately, the replacement Lenovo Legion 5 moves the webcam back to the top.

The Apple M1 chips make it worth coming back for that alone.

They are so good.

I have the M1 Macbook Air - I can't wait to see what the more powerful machines are like, but even the Air (without a fan) is a noticeably huge leap.

I hope they don't split up the eco-system again.

Likewise I've wanted one for a long time but at this rate will probably never come to pass. One reason are the reportedly weird but very persistent bugs as OP mentioned.

Bigger reason is uncertainty about the Windows platform. ChromeOS and macOS both run mobile apps, which bring a vast library and a level of integration (especially macOS + iOS) that seems increasingly hard to overlook. Add to this Microsoft's goal of switching to ARM and fragmenting its ecosystem, it becomes an even harder buy.

In general, the Surface lineup seems to be ~1 year behind in hardware compared to the rest of the industry, e.g. only now switching to TigerLake and Ryzen 4000 series CPU. Hardware itself is well packaged but a hard sell for its premium price. Furthermore Microsoft is delusional to sell RAM and SSD upgrades from 8GB to 16GB and 256GB to 512GB respectively for +$200.

> Bigger reason is uncertainty about the Windows platform.

Of all platforms to be worried about, I feel like Windows is the last one here (Web aside perhaps). It wouldn't be unreasonable to try running a program from Windows XP era and have it run fine in Windows 10.

As for the ARM fragmentation, fair enough but doesn't macOS face the same challenge? Windows 10 on Arm also supports running x86 apps without recompiling too.

You're right in that Windows will still be a viable platform for the lifespan of this laptop. My point was simply there are legitimate competitors now, especially due to their leveraging of mobile app libraries.

Right now it seems Apple has a better track record when it comes to the risk of ARM fragmentation - bolstered by their Rosetta translator is pretty good and the M1 hardware. For comparison, the Surface Pro X just received x64 emulation but its performance remains generally poor (not helped by the Qualcomm SQ1 SOC).

Yeah, the Surface Laptop 3 was on the list of my considerations a couple months ago because it checked most of my boxes, but reports of odd problems (like those you've mentioned) along with a common hairline screen crack problem pushed me to buy a ThinkPad instead.

I love my ThinkPad X1 extreme. I just threw manjaro on it this morning. Other than 2m of frustration thinking I can’t make a bootable usb stick and realising I need to disable secure boot, it works amazingly well.

Strangely enough tho it says my battery is 87% good. Tho the laptop is like 3 years old now.

I'm running Arch on mine, 2.5 years old, everything works fine, and I love it. I get dells at work, and also have a mbp, but no contest - surface laptop 3 is the bar for me.

UI for the automatic brightness adjustment setting is finally coming soon: https://twitter.com/DirectX12/status/1379911777849237508?s=2...

I agree that it’s incredibly bad (and I generally like Surface devices otherwise).

> The most painful problem with the machine is that WiFi is entirely unusable if you are simultaneously using bluetooth.

Wouldn't that be a problem of Windows itself? For me bluetooth has been a mess on every Windows machine. It's a miracle if something works and to get something working you even need to buy a dongle with a specific chip on it...

I had one Asus laptop that required me to occasionally toggle Bluetooth off and on again to reconnect my mouse. The rest of my laptops and my desktop's USB Bluetooth dongle have worked without issue for my mice and headphones. I don't think it's a common issue, but I'm just one person!

When you have good Bluetooth hardware, modern Windows versions seem to be pretty good with Bluetooth. Playing back on Bluetooth speakers or having Bluetooth mice or game pads seems to work pretty well. The most frustrating part is the issue of switching between Headset Profile and A2DP with bluetooth headsets. That always seems like a nightmare and prone to lots of frustrations.

I've definitely experienced what a bad Bluetooth adapter on Windows is like though. Things just failing to pair for no apparent reason, things randomly disconnecting, the thing seeming to forget all previous pairings, etc. I think that's usually been due to poor drivers. Earlier versions of Windows didn't really have much Bluetooth support out of the box, most of the stuff seemed to be implemented by each hardware vendor at the time. Compatibility issues were so common. This has largely seemed to go away especially when using modern Intel WiFi/BT chips and modern Windows.

Anecdote here, but I'm on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme, and I've never had any issues with the Bluetooth (or WiFi), or either, simultaneously.

I have, because I’m really stupid and bought a ax200 card from Amazon that apparently didn’t have BT on it... bought another one and it works totally fine.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi work together with no issues on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme. I'm using Wi-Fi on 5GHz. Haven't tried it on 2.4GHz; I imagine there could be more potential for interference there.

I mostly use Bluetooth with Apple AirPods. I tried running Ubuntu on the ThinkPad but it had the same problem I've seen on other Linux machines: the AirPods would only pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone.

I like Windows better anyway on the hardware, especially its support for different scaling factors on multiple monitors. So I run Linux in a VM or use WSL2.

With the AX200 [0], I've had absolutely no problem using both WiFi and BT simultaneously.

As with all things tho, YMMV.

0: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/189347/...

I don't own a Surface laptop, but my sister bought a Surface Pro (2 or 3, I'm not sure) a couple of years ago. She has already replaced the original charging adapters twice. The batteries also don't work unless they are plugged in. I think she also complains about wifi connectivity issues.

I thought Surface devices are built well, but after seeing my sister struggle with her Surface Pro, I have decided to not take the risk.

I have had a Laptop 3 for a while and haven't had most of these problems (I'm frequently using a bluetooth xbox controller + airpods pro + wifi on it). The ambient brightness thing is so goddamn annoying though! It's not an MS thing specifically (I know Dell XPS has it at least, too) but it is just the absolute worst.

Sorry to hear that. I've had a Surface Book, SB2, SB3, and looking forward to Surface Book 4 and Duo 2. The moment I got my original Surface Book, I felt like it was "the future" of laptops. I know the price tag puts a lot of people off, but it's essentially a tablet and a laptop in one device.

Not sure I could live without mine.

My Surface Book 2 is one of the purchases I regret the most.

The tablet mode is decent, although a USB port would have been nice. The display is fantastic, although a bit too reflective.

Using the machine is another story, battery life isn’t as exceptional as it’s made out to be, and it’s slow (even web browsing on Edge or Chrome is janky on anything other than “Better performance” mode).

Maybe the SB3 is better but the 2 has put me off.

> I have reloaded this thing from official image 3x and it will still randomly fuck up important things like hardware accelerated video playback and WiFi

Using a Surface Laptop 3 to write this, have had it since it came out (I guess maybe a little under a year now?). It's one of the most reliable laptops I've ever used.

>hardware accelerated video playback

Is this the same issue that I'm having where video and audio become increasingly out of sync as playback continues?

I have only noticed sync issues on a few live streams. Never on any local media.

My issue is that the video is completely black (or green in VLC). Disabling hardware acceleration resolves, but then it runs like garbage and cant resize with high quality interpolation.