You may want to hold off buying that Microsoft Surface

Yikes! You should probably hold off on that Microsoft Surface purchase you're thinking about, and hopefully you haven't already been swindled.

Consumer Reports announced Thursday it's withdrawing its coveted "recommendation" badge from four Microsoft Surface laptops that were previously blessed with the recognition.

The reason: It estimates about 25 percent of Surface computers will break within two years of ownership — an abysmal rate of reliability compared to other popular laptops and tablets.

The non-profit publication surveyed more than 90,000 tablet and laptop owners and discovered that about 25 percent of the sample who owned Microsoft Surface devices were presented with "problems by the end of the second year of ownership."

Brutal. So that means that if you buy a base price Microsoft Surface Laptop for $1,000, you're basically paying about $41 per month to use it before it breaks. Compare that to comparable devices like the MacBook or even Razer Blade, and frankly, it's just kind of sad.

However, keep in mind that there's no way the survey could take into account Surface products made in the last two years. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop as well as the latest Surface Book are all less than two years old. Even the first Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 haven't yet had their second birthdays. Mashable gave favorable reviews to all of those products, and the ones we've used for extended periods have held up.

In response to a query from Mashable, a Microsoft spokesperson responded, "While we respect Consumer Reports, we disagree with their findings. Microsoft’s real-world return and support rates and customer satisfaction data show we are on par if not better than other devices in the category. We stand firmly behind the quality and reliability of the Surface family of devices and continue to make quality our primary focus."