Microsoft had an event in New York this morning and I spent way too much of my lunch break watching the stream instead of eating. Panos Panay came out and did his usual thing where he holds hardware like it's a newborn, and this time the hardware was the Surface Studio, a 28-inch all-in-one with a hinge that lets the whole screen fold down flat so you can draw on it like a drafting table. They're calling the hinge "zero gravity" which is a pretty ridiculous name for what is, mechanically, a very nice counterweighted arm. It looks incredible. I mean that. The screen is thin at the edge in a way that shouldn't be possible for something with a full desktop's worth of components crammed into the base.
Then they said the price. $2,999 to start. And that's before you add the Surface Dial, the little puck-shaped input thing you can spin and click and set on the screen itself, which is another $99 on its own (or bundled in on some configs). At that point I stopped taking it seriously as something for me and started watching it purely as a product I'll never own, the way I watch car reveals for vehicles that cost more than I paid for my apartment.
I get who this is for, mostly. Its aimed at illustrators and video editors and architects, the crowd that currently buys iMacs and Wacom Cintiqs and stitches them together with cables and desk space they don't really have. For that person, three grand for one machine that replaces two might genuinely be a deal. I'm not that person. Im a guy who writes blog posts and occasionally messes with node scripts at 11pm, and my actual desktop is a five-year-old tower I built myself that cost less than the Surface Dial alone would cost new.
They also showed off the updated Surface Book, now with a beefier GPU option in the base and apparently something like 16 hours of battery life, which if true is wild for a laptop with a detachable screen. And there was a chunk of the presentation about the Creators Update coming to Windows 10 sometime early next year, with 3D stuff baked into Paint and Office, which felt like it was aimed squarely at justifying why you'd want a giant pen-friendly screen in the first place. Smart sequencing on their part, honestly. Show the software that makes the hardware make sense, right after you show the hardware.
Can I complain about something unrelated for a second? The event page kept auto-playing video with sound the second you scrolled near it, on a laptop, in a coffee shop, and I fumbled to mute it while the barista definitely judged me. Whoever decided autoplay-with-sound was a good default for a marketing page in 2016 should have to sit through their own homepage on a shared wifi connection at volume 80. Its a small thing. It ruins my mood every single time regardless.
Anyway. This is clearly Microsoft trying to plant a flag that says "we make premium hardware now, not just Excel," and honestly they've earned some benefit of the doubt on that after the last couple years of Surface Pro and Surface Book being genuinely well built. I still think back to how rough the original Surface RT launch was in 2012, the one with the weird ARM chip nobody wanted, and it's kind of remarkable they clawed their way from that to a machine reviewers are comparing favorably to the iMac.
Worth saying too, this whole week has had internet reliability on my mind for a different reason entirely, after that DNS mess last Friday knocked a bunch of major sites offline for people on the east coast. Different topic, but it's stuck in my head that so much of what looks solid, whether it's a DNS provider or a $3,000 all in one PC, is one weak link away from a bad day. Doesn't mean I dont want the Studio sitting on a desk somewhere I can go stare at it. Best Buy, if you're reading this, put one on display near me and I promise I'll come bother the sales staff at least twice.
I'll be over here on my five year old tower. It still boots.