Microsoft held their keynote event yesterday which saw the company unveil a number of initiatives it had undertaken, including its foray into virtual reality headsets. But perhaps the biggest takeaway from said event was the Microsoft Surface Studio, the latest product for the company’s Surface line.
Microsoft has always catered to two distinct groups of people when it came to both their software and hardware products. One is, of course, comprised of gamers. The PC Master Race has always utilised desktops and gaming laptops powered by Windows operating systems. Gamers with MacBooks were met with scorn and ridiculed across the internet (mostly on Reddit). The other group of people are the white collared job holders, who use Microsoft’s ecosystem to do their jobs on a daily basis. But what about those of us with a creative and artistic flair? Apple and their Macbooks have always been partial to that group of people. But perhaps not for much longer.
The Surface Studio is a touchscreen, all-in-one desktop that’s only 12.5 mm in so-called thickness. Utilising a “Zero Gravity hinge”, users will be able to transform the Surface from a conventional desktop form factor to a drafting board design apt for drawing and creative work. The biggest feature about the Surface Studio, and I do mean biggest, is the 28-inch, 4500×3000 PixelSense touchscreen display. The massive display, combined with the drafting board form factor and the Surface Pen, is a sure sell to professionals in the design industry.
Furthermore, there’s an optional peripheral one can get, the Surface Dial. The Surface Dial provides haptic feedback and lets users twist it to select items from an on-screen menu. However, the best part about is seamless contextual software control. For instance, you can snap the Dial onto the part of your display where you have the Photoshop window open and then you can use the dial as a colour picker or increase the thickness of your brush and so on. What’s more is that you can use the Surface Dial on smaller Surface laptops to transform them into mini Surface Studios.
And if you’re worried about not being able to run intensive programs or render in AutoCAD, you can put those worries to bed. You can opt for either a 6th gen Intel i5 or i7 when it comes to processing power. In terms of memory, Microsoft is offering 8GB,16GB or 32GB variants. The first of the two variants come with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 965M that offers 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Meanwhile, the 32GB variant comes with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980M that sports 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Storage wise, you can opt for 1 or 2 TB of rapid hybrid drives.
Price wise, the Surface Studio starts at $2,999 before ramping all the way up to $4,199 depending on which specs you opt for.
