Last month Microsoft removed the throttle that was limiting the rollout of the Creators Update, opening it up to every compatible machine. As a result, penetration of this latest version of Windows has gone from 50 percent to 65 percent, according to the numbers provided by AdDuplex.

With the Fall Creators Update due next month, at this point it seems likely that the deployment of the Creators Update won't be complete by the time the Fall Creators Update is released. This is a slower pace than the previous major update, the Anniversary Update. That was first released in July last year, and five months later it was at about 86-percent penetration.

The reason behind Microsoft's conservative deployment schedule isn't entirely clear, but perhaps it's simply a desire to avoid some of the problems that met the Anniversary Update's release. The Anniversary Update had some notable hardware incompatibilities, for example. While these problems were eventually fixed, this only occurred after a number of customer systems were (temporarily) broken. By being much more careful about which hardware the Creators Update was sent to, the rollout was much smoother. The one exception was systems with Intel's Clover Trail Atom processors: these won't ever be updated to the Creators Update and are stuck on the Anniversary Update forever.

The AdDuplex numbers also give a detailed breakdown of which models of Surface people are using. The Surface Pro 4 is, unsurprisingly, the most widely used Surface device—it was Microsoft's mainstream Surface offering for an extended period of time, so this isn't altogether surprising. What is a little more noteworthy is that the 2017 Surface Pro has about 2.5 times more usage than the Surface Laptop. These machines have been on the market for the same amount of time, and intuitively, Surface Laptop is the easier sales pitch: it's a thoroughly conventional laptop rather than the hybrid of tablet and laptop that the Surface Pro represents.

These early indicators would suggest, however, that Surface buyers know what they want and that they value the flexibility offered by the Pro over the lappability and familiarity of the Laptop.