Microsoft’s Surface team posted a cozy “research buddy” shot of a Surface Pro on Elon Musk’s X, but we noticed that the screen looks straight out of iPadOS. This post has now been deleted from X after hundreds of users called out Microsoft. I captured a screenshot before it was taken down.
The promo was on X for 18 hours and had 483K views when I spotted it online before it was deleted.
Microsoft’s social media intern might have used an AI model to generate an image of Surface Pro, but the model likely hallucinated and used an iPad-style UI for the hardware’s screen.
As you can see in the above screenshot of the company’s X post, Microsoft says Surface Pro is your research buddy because it has built-in Copilot that can not only read the content for you but also highlight and summarize.
Sounds like a cool feature, but only until you realize you need to pay for Microsoft 365 to use Copilot in Word. Also, you’ll easily run out of the AI credits unless you pay $20 for the Copilot Pro subscription every month. I’m not going to get into how Copilot in Word isn’t really a decent “research buddy,” but take a closer look at the image here.
I zoomed in for you:
Here’s a better, cropped, and closer look:
Do you see the iPadOS-like status bar? Windows does not have a status bar. It does not even have a bar at the top of the screen. It’s classic iPadOS in the image. The status bar at the top shows time, Wi-Fi, and battery in the iPad layout, and we also have the toolbar icons and the three-dot multitasking control at the top.
If the alleged Surface Pro was using Windows 11, you would normally have a Windows taskbar with the Start button and app icons.
Also, it’s not just the software. This hardware in the image looks like a generic tablet at a glance… more or less like an iPad. You don’t have a kickstand, nor a Type Cover in the image. These are signature features of the Surface brand.
While I’m probably thinking a bit too much about the image, if you look closely, the screen shape also feels closer to 4:3, while Surface Pro uses a 3:2 display.
Microsoft took down the X post after hundreds of users and X community note flagged the problem.
It’s not the first time a tech giant has accidentally promoted an Apple product
This incident reminds me of how Samsung’s social media representative was once caught using an iPhone to tweet the smartphone’s launch event.
If I recall correctly, this happened in 2021. Around the same time, Samsung’s celebrity ambassadors were also spotted using an iPhone instead of a Galaxy phone. Famous YouTuber MKBHD would often catch brands using an iPhone over their own hardware, but that was about four years ago.
Now, Samsung has been very careful about its social media strategy after those goof-ups, but Microsoft still needs to learn a lesson or two.
Microsoft’s case is actually worse, and it should be a wake-up call for brands against using AI.
