Slashdot Mirror


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.

8 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:GPU? by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Touch Screen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    You seem really cool and fun.

  3. Re:2 TB Hard drive? by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hybrid drives are fine provided the operating system knows that it's dealing with one and can exploit that fact by keeping the commonly used files in the flash memory and rarely used files or those large files that can be streamed quickly enough from the spinning disk stored on that part of the drive.

    However, as this seems to be a professional type device, they should be building in a different solution that involves some kind or RAID storage. Or perhaps they just assume anyone with a brain or the past experiencing of an untimely disk failure already has an external setup so why bother baking it into the system.

  4. Re:Lots of Microsoft ads on the front page today by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Microsoft held a press conference announcing a lot of stuff today, and it's tech news.

    Tomorrow, Apple is holding a press conference to announce a lot of shit, so expect to get a lot of Apple slashvertisements tomorrow.

    That's just kind of a natural side effect of companies announcing a lot of things at big events - a lot of news about them is generated all at once.

  5. Re:GPU? by Misagon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  6. Re:back camera by djchristensen · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's clearly for "stealth mode". Turn on the rear camera and display the image on the screen, and the computer becomes nearly invisible!

  7. Re:Uh..... the price tag?! by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  8. Not courageous enough by bazorg · · Score: 5, Funny

    Too many full sized USB and Ethernet ports, legacy headphone jack, Escape key... lame.