With Working From Home being the norm for many people now and in the foreseeable future, Microsoft’s concept of designing devices to help you do what you need, from anywhere, has taken, says the company, “on new weight since we first started working on these products”. Instead of planes, coffee shops and offices, continues Microsoft, “we’re moving from home office to kitchen table to couch, but our need for devices that keep us productive and connected has never been greater.”
The new Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2, Surface Earbuds and accessories are designed to help you achieve that goal. According to Microsoft, the Surface Go 2 delivers incredible value in a light, portable design, providing a great device for anyone in your company or family, The Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds complete your Surface experience, helping you find focus wherever you are and stay connected to the people and content that matters.
Surface Dock 2 and the Travel Hub
Three other products announced this May will attract the attention from professionals: the Surface Dock 2 and the multi-port Microsoft USB-C Travel Hub, which help you set up the ultimate workspace wherever that may be, and the Surface Book 3, which the company announces as its most powerful laptop ever, a computer designed for professionals who need desktop-level performance from anywhere.
Surface Dock 2 helps you expand your workspace with a simple magnetic click and delivers faster charging, higher data transfer rates and the enterprise management tools people have been asking for. The company also announced a new multi-port Microsoft USB-C Travel Hub to give you more ways to connect to networks, displays and USB-C accessories when you’re on the go. Surface Dock 2 is priced at $259.99 and the Microsoft USB-C Travel Hub is priced at $99.99. Both will start shipping to customers later this month in select markets.
The highlight of the announcement, at least for professionals, is the Surface Book 3, which starts at $1599 and will be available starting May 21. Since its first version the Surface Book laptop family was designed with a goal: to give people the power of a desktop, the versatility of a tablet, and the freedom of a light and thin laptop in one beautifully designed device. Developers, designers and professionals rely on Surface Book for coding and compiling, workloads in Adobe and Autodesk, and for gaming with Xbox Game Pass for PC or on Steam.
Microsoft says that the Surface Book 3 is its most powerful laptop ever, providing up to 50% more performance than Surface Book 2 and up to 17.5 hours of battery life (on the 15-inch model). That’s impressive, when one considers that the Surface Book 2 was already presented, at launch, at the end of 2017, as Microsoft’s most powerful Surface laptop ever, built with power and versatility to be a laptop, tablet, and portable studio all-in-one, and also offered, about 17 hours of battery life.
The Surface Book 3 comes in two screen sizes, 13-inch or 15-inch, both offering, states Microsoft, “beautifully crisp, high-DPI PixelSense Display, smooth, precise trackpad, comfortable keyboard and the performance of 10th Generation Intel Core processors and choice of discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX or Quadro RTX GPUs. The 13.5-inch version has a resolution of 3000 x 2000 (267 PPI), while the 15-inch has a resolution of 3240 x 2160, (260 PPI). Both have an aspect ratio of 3:2 and contrast ratio of 1600:1, on the 10 point multi-touch G5 PixelSense Display.
For developers that push the computing and IO performance of their device, Surface Book 3 now comes with up to 32GB of RAM and the fastest SSD Microsoft has ever shipped. For people who love to game, Surface Book 3 15-inch has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPU with enough power to play the top Xbox Game Pass for PC titles at 1080p in a smooth 60 frames per second. The company has also added a new option with the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 to better meet the needs of commercial customers and higher education institutions.
The Surface Book 3 laptop starts at $1599 for the 13.5 inch version, with Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD and Intel Iris Plus graphics card. The top version of the laptop, with the 15-inch screen, Intel Core i7, 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD and NVIDIA GeForce costs $3399,99. The Surface Book 3 will be available starting May 21.