New Surfaces

Panos Panay, Robin Seiler, and Pete Kyriacou introduced two new Surface devices yesterday in a succinct nine and a half minute video from Microsoft’s campus. I have to say, I really like how product announcements from the tech majors have evolved over the last year from something that indexes heavily on creating an exciting environment for the limited number people in the room to one that speaks more naturally to a more global audience.

As to the devices themselves, it’s the new ARM-based Surface Pro X that has my interest here. Full time LTE connectivity, massive promised battery life, evolving native ARM app support, 267ppi display, and full WSL2 support make this a machine that I wouldn’t mind to have as my next Windows portable to hack on while still fully supporting all the Office apps I use for my day job.

The super small Surface Laptop Go isn’t quite as attractive to me – in part because it maxes out at 8GB of RAM and a 148ppi display. It’s not really targeted at people like me, however. The introduction video featured several kids using the new device and it’s pretty obvious that the education market is a huge target for it. As a parent of a kid who will be in school soon, I may be the target audience for a revision of this device sometime in a few years, but not yet.

Anyway, it’s cool to see the hardware team and Microsoft keep putting out updates and shipping, despite all the challenges in the world. I dig the Surface Laptop 3 that I’m currently writing this on and look forward to the lineup evolving forward.