Seems like Surface products are on life support. A lot of them out of stock, the newest models only available to corporate account holders, and not much innovation the past few years.
Surface Hardware line
If Bowden's reports are accurate - Microsoft basically reduced the Surface product line to 3ish existing products - those that sell well in the business/enterprise and education. Forget "Surface Duo/Neo" and inovations for years to come.
- Surface Pro tablet
- Surface Laptop*
- Surface Go tablet.
*it's unclear if the Laptop Go and Laptop Studio will continue
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Consumers aren't a primary target - since a while
The consumer market - Xbox aside - is not a primary market for Microsoft, that's been happening ever since Steve Balmer left.
The new Windows leadership is from/under their services division, their focus is on (ads and) services, hence the 180 turn as to offer some new services backports and extended security updates to Windows 10 - the later albeit for $ only, but it's open to consumers aswell.
Qualcom's new (Snapdragon Elite Plus/X) ARM CPUs do supposedly finally offer a somewhat competitive overall performance in relation to Apple's M products. Yet I think those ARM based "consumer" versions of Surface Pro's, along with the improved WindowsOnARM are basically a "proof of concept" showcase for business/enterprise world.
I've read multiple legitimate sources that their reliability was among the lowest of any brand.
Hardware quality/reliability
I work for a global airline and deal with crew hard- and software on a daily basis.
User-error/accidents aside - the Surface's lines product quality noticeably decreased (lots of board-, screen- and fan defects, more bloated batteries) than with earlier versions.
We do have a lot less hardware issues with iPads, though Apple has other issues on the software/management side... Fingers crossed iPadOS and changes due to EU regulations can help in those regards.
