Microsoft Announces Ultra-Thin, Pixel-Dense Surface Studio Touchscreen PC (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's first Surface-branded desktop PC now exists, and it is called the Surface Studio. The PC features a 28" display with 13.5 million pixels, which means the display is roughly 63 percent denser than a "4K" screen at 3840x2160 resolution. That screen is also an astonishing 12.5mm thick. The specs we know so far: an integrated 270W PSU, 2TB "rapid" hard drive (meaning, hopefully, an SSD portion in a "hybrid" configuration, but that is not yet confirmed), 32GB RAM, a quad-core Skylake CPU, and a Windows Hello-compatible front-facing camera. In his demonstration of the device, Panos Panay, Microsoft's head of Windows hardware, held up a piece of paper to demonstrate "true scale" resolution density, so that holding that paper up to the screen would offer like-for-like comparability. He also showed off live color gamut switching, which visual designers will clearly appreciate.Update: 10/26 17:59 GMT: FastCompany has an in-depth story on Surface Studio and how it was conceived.

Comments

GPU?

[caferace]

Nothing about the GPU? That's ... lame.

Re:GPU?

[alvinrod]

The linked article says it's got somewhere between a GeForce GTX 965M and 980M, so slightly old kit, but some of the best available as far as mobile GPUs go.

Re:GPU?

[Misagon]

There are three models. The i5/8GB and i7/16GB models has GTX 965M w/ 2GB mem.
The i7/32GB model has a GTX 980M w/ 4GB memory.

Note that NVidia's mobile GPUs in that generation (900-series, "Maxwell" architecture) are lower-specced chips than the non-M desktop chips.

Meanwhile, there are laptops out with NVidia's next generation of GPUs (10-series, "Pascal") and those do not have different chips in the mobile GPUs, they are only binned and clocked slightly lower, not as a significant difference.

Re:Uh..... the price tag?!

[Greyfox]

I suppose you're largely paying for thin there. I can get a similarly speced Dell Precision with a touch screen and a 2TB SSD for about $1000 less (With Linux preiinstalled.) The Apple Trash Can is competing in the workstation arena, though, and I just did a monster VR desktop build and was having trouble breaking 4 grand with it. Although it would have been a lot easier if I were trying to put a Xeon or dual Xeon in it. The amount of labor I put in to building it myself probably would have tacked another $1000 or so onto the price.

Given that you'd be able to use that (Apple) machine for upwards of 10 years if you wanted to, the price isn't particularly unreasonable. My first aluminum mac pro from 2005-ish is currently serving as an asterisk box for a friend of mine who has a small business and needed a PBX system, and the machine is still plenty capable of doing that. It wasn't even ridiculously expensive for a dual Xeon workstation at the time -- I don't think I could have built one for less money back then.

Re:Uh..... the price tag?!

[MachineShedFred]

Except it really doesn't. You can configure iMac 27" 5K to have a 4GHz 4-core CPU, 2TB "fusion" drive (probably same hybrid thing Microsoft has here), 32GB RAM, and a Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB VRAM for $3400.

That's basically the same machine, except with an Apple logo and OS X instead of Microsoft logos and Windows 10, and no touchscreen. And, the bit that makes the touchscreen even remotely useable was patented by Apple 6 years ago so Microsoft didn't even come up with that - they can just use it through the cross-licensing agreement that the two companies share.

Is the touchscreen and Windows 10 really worth $800?