Some fresh statistics on Microsoft’s range of Surface devices clearly show which are the most popular of these hybrids, and the straggler of the family – that would be the shiny bells-and-whistles-laden Surface Book.
AdDuplex, an ad network which crunches data on Windows hardware, shared a breakdown of the Surface devices out there, and their relative market share amongst all of Microsoft’s hybrids.
And the real surprise is that the Surface Book only accounts for 3.6% of Surface devices. The Surface Pro 4, which launched at the same time as the Surface Book (last autumn in the States), has snared a 30.9% share in the same timeframe. That means the Pro 4 has sold nine times the amount that the Surface Book managed to shift.
But the most popular Surface hybrid of them all is the Surface Pro 3, which holds a 33.3% share of the market. In third place, the vanilla Surface 3 sits on 21.5%.
Even the original Surface Pro and Pro 2 outperform the Surface Book on 6.9% and 3.9% respectively.
Nestling in a niche?
Of course, because these are merely percentages of Surface device market share and not hard numbers, it’s impossible to tell whether the Surface Book has been a relative flop – this priciest of the Surface variants may just have had a much smaller production run compared to the Pro family.
Given the price of the thing, the Surface Book is naturally a more niche market anyway (you’re looking at shelling out a bare minimum of £1,300 for the basic model, or $1,500 over in the US, and splashing that sort of cash on a convertible certainly isn’t to everybody’s tastes).
Even so, it’s pretty shocking to see such a low market share for a quality piece of hardware from Microsoft – we loved the thing in our review, and we certainly weren’t alone.
Of course, the fact that in this country, the Surface Book wasn’t launched until February – a full four months after the American launch – probably didn’t help Redmond’s cause in the UK (and indeed the 1TB variant is only just on pre-order now, with this model having been available in the US since the start of the year).
Indeed, these stock and distribution issues do point to the fact that there was a much more limited production run (certainly initially) with the Surface Book.
Source: techradar.com
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The Surface Pro was more readily available and cheaper. It's also the more portable device.
Dedicated graphics are niche too.