When the new skylake hardware came out all the drivers where crap. People with new Surface Pro 4s, Surface Books, Dell XPS 13s, etc... where having all kinds of problems.
All these machines work great now, but I wouldn't want to go through that pain again just for the sake of getting a little more performance (for average use).
Also, I personally get nervous when asked to buy a crap hardware+drivers combo on the promise that the drivers will be fixed later and the hardware's full power will be released... what guarantee do I have that there won't be a fundamental hardware issue that drivers can't hack around?
I've got a machine that has a wireless card with the draft version of the wireless N standard, and presumably some promise that updates could fix it when the real thing came out. The real thing came out, and the card's N support has never worked. Fortunately there's a somewhat-deeply-buried setting for both Linux and Windows that lets you turn it off entirely and have the card degrade into a perfectly-functional b/g card, because once real N networks came out it tries really hard to connect to them. And it almost works. You can get about a megabyte or so over the N network before the connection somehow fails. Then another couple hundred kilobytes about 10 seconds later, and so on. Terrible.
How much more concerned about that I would be if I intended to ship a few million such units out. The "fixed drivers in the future" promise isn't that reliable.
Comments
When the new skylake hardware came out all the drivers where crap. People with new Surface Pro 4s, Surface Books, Dell XPS 13s, etc... where having all kinds of problems.
All these machines work great now, but I wouldn't want to go through that pain again just for the sake of getting a little more performance (for average use).
Also, I personally get nervous when asked to buy a crap hardware+drivers combo on the promise that the drivers will be fixed later and the hardware's full power will be released... what guarantee do I have that there won't be a fundamental hardware issue that drivers can't hack around?
I've got a machine that has a wireless card with the draft version of the wireless N standard, and presumably some promise that updates could fix it when the real thing came out. The real thing came out, and the card's N support has never worked. Fortunately there's a somewhat-deeply-buried setting for both Linux and Windows that lets you turn it off entirely and have the card degrade into a perfectly-functional b/g card, because once real N networks came out it tries really hard to connect to them. And it almost works. You can get about a megabyte or so over the N network before the connection somehow fails. Then another couple hundred kilobytes about 10 seconds later, and so on. Terrible.
How much more concerned about that I would be if I intended to ship a few million such units out. The "fixed drivers in the future" promise isn't that reliable.