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Microsoft Surface Headphones 2 — Do Not Buy!

Surface Headphones are bound to snap. 

Your fault? No!

Design flaw? Yes!

What led me to buy the Surface Headphones?

I bought a Surface Laptop 3 at the beginning of 2020. I previously and still own a MacBook Air, but between the low RAM and being in a school environment where the majority of engineering students had Windows OS devices, it made sense to start exploring laptops. This is the beginning of my nightmare introduction into the Microsoft’s Surface product line. The Surface Laptop has a plethora of issues, enough for its own article — so I will refrain from dragging it into this article. 

Fast forward a couple of months later, COVID hits and this new chapter of work from home begins. At the time I was in a role that required me to be on the phone frequently and pressing the phone between my neck and ear didn’t seem like a sustainable option for the long term so when the Surface Headphones 2 were announced, it was perfect timing. 

How did the Surface Headphones snap?

I picked them up, put them on my head as I did every work day and boom it snapped. Incredible! At this point there was no frustration as I knew nothing I had done contributed to this. I can live with the results of a clumsy phone drop, sitting on my glasses or any other accidental mishaps that have costly outcomes, but this was not the case! 

The aftermath 

Immediately after this happens, I plug away a simple search into Google and it turns out that this issue seems to be fairly common. At this point, I am no longer calm, cool and collected as I am in disbelief a company of this scale can roll out headphones with a design flaw that makes the headphones unusable. I mean we are talking about MICROSOFT, the second largest American company!

This situation that presented itself on just a regular day is starting to suck, but my thinking was that once I reach out to Customer Service they will sort this all out and I will get a new pair in a couple of days, right? Wrong! What a nightmare and waste of time this turned out to be! Now at the beginning customer service journey I was hopeful, even more so when they acknowledged the fact that they know this an issue on their end and it wasn’t my fault. What ensued after this was hours of back and forth emailing for the final outcome to them offering me refurbished headphones for $179. 

The outcome 

I turned down the refurbished headphones for $179. Why?

  • $179 is not full retail price, but it is still a decent amount of money for a product with a known design flaw and from reading stories online — I am lucky mine even lasted as long as they did.
  • When I looked on Amazon, the headphones were retailing for $199 brand new so it made no sense why they would offer that price point and believe they were doing me a favor. To top that all off — for me to get that price I would have had to have sent the broken pair back. 

In short, I will never buy another Surface product. The headphones I bought soon after were the Sony WH-1000XM4, which are much better than the Surface Headphones in all areas except the design. 

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