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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.
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.
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.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
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?
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