No Support for Surface on Long-Term Servicing Branch

General-purpose Surface devices will not be eligible for Microsoft product support if running the Windows 10 Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) under a policy announced Oct. 2016. For support purposes, Microsoft considers Surface devices running productivity software such as the Office suite to be general-purpose devices. A customer encountering problems on a general-purpose Surface device on LTSB might have to change the device’s OS to get Microsoft support.

Problems with Office and Productivity Software

LTSB is the most stable of the three servicing options Microsoft offers for Windows 10. Computers running LTSB must have security updates applied monthly to remain eligible for product support, but feature updates may be deferred up to 10 years. The other two servicing options, Current Branch (CB) and Current Branch for Business (CBB), require customers to deploy feature updates several times a year.

Organizations might have assumed they could get the best reliability by selecting Microsoft Surface hardware and deploying LTSB because a single vendor would be responsible for the complete configuration of hardware and software, and configuration changes would be minimal. However, some feature updates may contain new features or improvements that the latest Office and other productivity software will require when running on Surface. For example, an Office application might require digital ink and pen updates to use those features on Surface. Consequently, Surface devices running these types of applications on LTSB will eventually have problems.