Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The future of Surface is incredibly unclear with these new devices”.
Okay, we just got wrapped up at Microsoft, special surface and AI event in New York city, where the company announced a bunch of new Surface Hardware. They focused really hard on AI and this new co-pilot system, and then there was the big question hanging over this event. About the future of Windows and surface now that Microsoft’s former surface and windows Chief Panos Panay, has announced his resignation, but before we get into all of that, let’s check out the new Surface Hardware so surface this year is a lot more iterative than we’re used to There’S no big new Surface device, it’s all sort of upgrades on existing Hardware, so we’ve got the surface go 4, which is kind of like the smaller Surface Pro with chips inside that are nowhere near as powerful. Then you’ve got the surface laptop, Go free, which is on 12th gen chips, and it’s kind of like the alternative to these surface laptop the sort of fully fledged device that Microsoft has and then there’s the surface Hub free, which is really for commercial customers in businesses.
But the one that’s the kind of star of the show. If that’s what we want to call, it is the surface laptop Studio too. It’S always been the spiritual successor to the surface book and this year Microsoft is upgrading the innards but they’re also doing some tweaks on the outside, but it largely looks the same as the original surface laptop Studio.
So, let’s check out what’s changed on the outside. So, first up there’s a Micro SD card reader on the side, so you can expand storage and then, on the left hand, side there’s a USB, a port so useful for sort of your legacy peripherals alongside the USBC ports that we had originally anyway, and that, I Guess is most of the changes Microsoft’s adding a charging port for this surface – slim pen 2, which is kind of useful because it still sits underneath the keyboard and trackpad. Really the other big upgrade on the outside and you could argue on the inside is the trackpad.
So this year you can change the haptic feedback on this. You can change how sensitive the click is, but there’s another thing here that Microsoft’s really focusing on and that’s accessibility. So they have a new mode on the trackpad which essentially disables Palm rejection, and they showed it in the demo on stage with a guy who was born without fingers on one hand.
So now he can actually use the trackpad and it’s helping him out in his day-to-day activity. That’S not something that I had personally thought about, but now I’m like, why doesn’t every trackpad have the ability to disable Palm rejection because it would sure be a lot more inclusive, okay, so that covers the outside. But on the inside there’s a lot of upgrades too.
So Microsoft’s upgrading to the 13th gen Intel core processors, there’s also the ability to pick between the RTX, 4050 or 4060 GPU, which seem like they would be pretty good for PC gaming and obviously Creator applications as well – and this is the first surface device that you Can upgrade to 64 gig of RAM alongside up to two terabytes of storage inside as well, there’s also a tiny little chip inside developed by Intel, it’s called an npu, a neural processing unit and it’s an AI chip which essentially boosts these AI tasks in Windows. So we’ve seen some of this before, with the Surface Pro 9, the arm powered version where it’ll do sort of like removing background noise when you’re talking on a conference call. So we haven’t seen a bunch of applications, take advantage of this mpu just yet, but I’ve got a good feeling, that’s going to change over the next year, because Microsoft spent I’d, say 90 of the time talking about AI on stage today and in particular co-pilot now, Co-Pilot, isn’t new Microsoft announced this earlier this year, but it’s essentially this AIA powered assistant. That’S there when you need to call it up, think about Cortana and how that was supposed to be revolutionary in your life and work and be there as this assistant. This co-pilot feels like it might actually do that.
So Microsoft spent a bunch of time talking about how co-pilot will you know, write your emails for you or respond to them for you or like do some Excel data analysis for you, but it got me thinking. Is it really going to work quite as well as what they showed on stage and I think we’re going to find out real soon, because copilot is coming to Windows 11 in an update on September 26th? And I think this is kind of the beginning of then planting this co-pilot seed into windows and really it’s going to grow on November 1st when it comes to the office app. So that means it’s going to show up in Excel it’s going to analyze data. For you, it’s going to show up in word where you can just get it to rewrite your paragraphs, and it should show up in stuff like Outlook as well, but you can just get it to write emails to your boss and stuff all this stuff.
If it works really well is going to really change the way you create office documents and Microsoft says that it’s also coming to Consumers as well. So it’s coming to businesses first, but when it comes to Consumers, I think that’s going to be super interesting, so they’re putting copilot in Windows they’re putting co-pilot in office, but it felt like there was something missing here at this event today. So obviously, Mike’s announced the surface laptop Studio 2 with this mpu, but they didn’t really explain why that really matters.
So this felt like a co-pilot Sales Event where Microsoft was selling this on its co-pilot system, rather than the vision of how surface windows and office will fully adapt to this new AI future. And I think some of that lacking of vision is because Microsoft, Surface and windows Chief panels, pane, announces resignation earlier this week, and so we just didn’t really get that sort of future looking stuff that we might have seen in the past or like a strategy for Where this all goes over the next 12 months or way into the future, is there even going to be a surface event next year, or is it just going to be a co-pilot? An AI event? Is Microsoft going to get back to this Innovative Hardware? That kind of pushed the boundaries that was the successive Surface, Microsoft create the Surface Pro. It was something that others weren’t doing, but with copilot and AI.
It feels like the entire tech industry is pivoting in that direction, and Microsoft is going to need to stand out Beyond just co-pilot, so the big question remains: how exactly is Microsoft, going to reinvent windows and its surface Hardware in this new AI era? Okay, it’s been a crazy week for Microsoft, they’ve had Xbox leaks panels, panes, apparently joining Amazon, and now this surface and AI event, we’ve covered all of this and a lot more so check out the verge.com .