Microsoft had a hardware event in New York yesterday and unveiled the Surface Pro 3, and I've been sitting here for like twenty minutes trying to get past the fact that Panos Panay stood on a stage and used the word "lapability" no fewer than four separate times. Its not a word. I checked. Its the kind of thing a product marketing deck spits out when everyone in the room is too polite to say "you cant just staple 'lap' and 'ability' together and expect nobody to notice."
Anyway. The actual device is more interesting than the vocabulary, so let me back up.
The Surface Pro 3 has a 12-inch display now, up from the 10.6 inches on the Pro 2, running at 2160x1440 in a 3:2 aspect ratio instead of the usual 16:9 widescreen everything else uses. Thats the same ratio as a legal pad, which is apparently the point, they want this thing to feel like a notebook you write on rather than a movie screen you watch. It weighs 800 grams and is 9.1mm thick, thinner than the last two generations combined would suggest. Starting price is $799 for the Core i3 model with 64GB of storage, and it climbs all the way to $1,949 if you want the Core i7 with 512GB. The Type Cover keyboard, which lets be honest is not optional if you actually want to get work done on this thing, is another $129.99 on top of whatever tier you pick. That part still annoys me. Its been the same complaint since the original Surface RT and nobody at Microsoft seems to think its worth fixing.
The kickstand is the part I actually care about. Instead of the two fixed positions the Pro 2 had, this one has a friction hinge that lets you set it anywhere between something like 22 and 150 degrees. If youve ever tried to use a tablet propped up on an airplane tray table at exactly the wrong angle for your eyeballs, you understand why this matters more than it sounds like it should.
Which brings me back to the lapability thing, because thats actually what Panay was trying to sell people on: the idea that you can use this on your actual lap, on a couch, on a bus, without a table anywhere nearby. Ive got a Surface Pro 2 sitting next to me right now (yes I bought last years model, no I dont want to talk about it) and Ive tried exactly this, on the 40 minute bus ride I take most weekday mornings. It does not go well. The kickstand digs into your thighs, the whole assembly wants to slide forward every time the bus brakes, and typing on the Type Cover while its balanced on denim is an exercise in constant micro-adjustment. Maybe the new hinge fixes some of that. I genuinely dont know yet, I havent had my hands on one, Im just going off the keynote and the press photos like everybody else writing about this today.
What I do know is that Microsoft skipped a whole tier of the lineup here. There was a Surface RT, then a Surface 2, alongside the Pro line, and this time around theres no equivalent non-Pro Surface 3 sitting next to it. Its just Pro 3, full stop, like they quietly decided the cheap ARM-based version of this product wasnt worth continuing and hoped nobody would ask about it out loud. Somebody probably will, eventually, but not today, today everyone's just talking about the hinge and the pen.
Speaking of the pen, it now has a button on top that opens OneNote directly from a locked screen, and a magnetic strip on the side of the tablet so it doesn't roll off your desk and vanish under the couch the way every stylus Ive ever owned eventually does. I have a small graveyard of these things in a drawer somewhere, three different capacitive styluses from three different tablets, none of which I use anymore because none of them felt like writing with an actual pen. Well see if this one's different.
The tagline they're pushing is "the tablet that can replace your laptop," which is the exact same pitch they made for the Surface Pro and the Pro 2, both of which I would argue did not actually replace anyone's laptop. Third time's the charm, maybe. Im curious enough that Ill probably end up trading in the 2 for this once it actually ships, but Im not rushing out on day one. Let somebody else find out if the lapability holds up on a real bus first.